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PORTRAITS OF PLACES 



fytnty Mantes 



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HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO., 
Boston and New York. 

/ 



HENRY JAMES 



PORTRAITS OF PLACES 



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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 









Copyright, 1883, 
JJy James R. Osgood and Company. 



All rights reserved. 



FIFTH IMPRESSION 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A, 
Printed by H. O. Houghton & Company. 



NOTE. 

The following papers originally appeared in the 
Century, the Atlantic Monthly, the Galaxy Magazine, 
in that of Lippincott, and in the New York Tribune 
and The Nation. The four last chapters in the book, 
which were the earliest published, can now have (in 
some slight degree) only the value of history. The 
lapse of thirteen years will have brought many 
changes to Saratoga, Newport, Quebec, and Niagara. 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

I. Venice 1 

II. Italy Revisited 39 

III. Occasional Paris 75 

IV. Rheims and Laon : A Little Tour ... 96 
V. Chartres 120 

VI. Rouen 130 

VII. Etretat 139 

VIII. From Normandy to the Pyrenees. . . . 148 

IX. An English Easter 181 

X. London at Midsummer 210 

XL Two Excursions 228 

XII. In Warwickshire 247 

XIII. Abbeys and Castles 270 

XIV. English Vignettes 287 

XV. An English New Year 307 

XVI. An English Winter Watering-Place . . 316 

XVII. Saratoga 324 

XVIII. Newport 338 

XIX. Quebec 350 

XX. Niagara 364 



VENICE. 

1882. 

It is a great pleasure to write the word ; but I am 
not sure there is not a certain impudence in pre- 
tending to add anything to it. Venice has been 
painted and described many thousands of times, 
and of all the cities of the world it is the easiest 
to visit without going there. Open the first book 
and you will find a rhapsody about it ; step into 
the first picture-dealer's and you will find three or 
four high-coloured " views " of it. There is nothing 
more to be said about it. Every one has been there, 
and every one has brought back a collection of 
photographs. There is as little mystery about the 
Grand Canal as about our local thoroughfare; and 
the name of St. Mark is as familiar as the postman's 
ring. It is not forbidden, however, to speak of 
familiar things, and I believe that, for the true 
Venice-lover, Venice is always in order. There is 
nothing new to be said about it certainly, but the 
old is better than any novelty. It would be a sad 
day, indeed, when there should be something new 
to say. I write these lines with the full conscious- 

B 



2 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [l 

ness of having no information whatever to offer. I 
do not pretend to enlighten the reader ; I pretend 
only to give a fillip to his memory ; and I hold any 
writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love 
with his topic. 

I. 

Mr. Euskin has given it up, that is very true ; 
but it is only after extracting half a life-time of 
pleasure and an immeasurable quantity of fame 
from it. We all may do the same, after it has 
served our turn, which it probably will not cease 
to do for many a year to come. Meantime, it is 
Mr. Euskin who, beyond any one, helps us to enjoy. 
He has, indeed, lately produced several aids to 
depression in the shape of certain little humorous — 
ill -humorous — pamphlets (the series of St. Mark's 
Best), which embody his latest reflections on the 
subject of Venice and describe the latest atrocities 
that have been perpetrated there. These latter are 
numerous and deeply to be deplored; but to admit 
that they have spoiled Venice would be to admit 
that Venice may be spoiled — an admission preg- 
nant, as it seems to us, with disloyalty. Fortun- 
ately, one reacts against the Euskinian contagion, 
and one hour of the lagoon is worth a hundred 
pages of demoralised prose. This queer, late-coming 
prose of Mr. Euskin (including the revised and con- 
densed issue of the Stones of Venice, only one little 
volume of which has appeared or, perhaps, will ever 
appear) is all to be read, though much of it seems 
to be addressed to children of tender age. It is 
pitched in the nursery-key, and might be supposed 



I.] VENICE. 3 

to emanate from an angry governess. It is, how- 
ever, all suggestive, and much of it is delightfully 
just. There is an inconceivable want of form in 
it, though the author has spent his life in laying 
down the principles of form, and scolding people 
for departing from them ; but it throbs and flashes 
with the love of his subject — a love disconcerted 
and abjured, but which has still some of the force 
of inspiration. Among the many strange things that 
have befallen Venice, she has had the good fortune 
to become the object of a pajssion to a man of 
splendid genius, who has made her his own, and, 
in doing so, has made her the world's. There is no 
better reading at Venice, therefore, as I say, than 
Buskin, for every true Venice -lover can separate 
the wheat from the chaff. The narrow theological 
spirit, the moralism o\ tout propos, the queer pro- 
vincialities and pruderies, are mere wild weeds in 
a mountain of flowers. One may doubtless be very 
happy in Venice without reading at all — without 
criticising or analysing or thinking a strenuous 
thought. It is a city in which, I suspect, there is 
very little strenuous thinking, and yet it is a city 
in which there must be almost as much happiness 
as misery. The misery of Venice stands there for 
all the world to see ; it is part of the spectacle — 
a thorough -going devotee of local colour might 
consistently say it is part of the pleasure. The 
Venetian people have little to call their own — little 
more than the bare privilege of leading their lives 
in the most beautiful of towns. Their habitations 
are decayed; their taxes heavy; their pockets light: 
their opportunities few. One receives an impres- 



4 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [i. 

sion, however, that life presents itself to them with 
attractions not accounted for in this meagre train 
of advantages, and that they are on better terms 
with it than many people who have made a better 
bargain. They He in the sunshine ; they dabble in 
the sea ; they wear bright rags ; they fall into atti- 
tudes and harmonies ; they assist at an eternal 
conversazione. It is not easy to say that one would 
have them other than they are, and it certainly 
would make an immense difference should they be 
better fed. The number of persons in Venice who 
evidently never have enough to eat is painfully 
large ; but it would be more painful if we did not 
equally perceive that the rich Venetian temperament 
may bloom upon a dog's allowance. Nature has 
been kind to it, and sunshine and leisure and con- 
versation and beautiful views form the greater part 
of its sustenance. It takes a great deal to make a 
successful American ; but to make a happy Venetian 
takes only a handful of quick sensibility. The 
Italian people have, at once, the good and evil 
fortune to be conscious of few wants; so that if 
the civilisation of a society is measured by the 
number of its needs, as seems to be the common 
opinion to-day, it is to be feared that the children 
of the lagoon would make but a poor figure in a set 
of comparative tables. Not their misery, doubtless, 
but the way they elude their misery, is what pleases 
the sentimental tourist, who is gratified by the sight 
of a beautiful race that lives by the aid of its ima- 
gination. The way to enjoy Venice is to follow 
the example of these people and make the most of 
simple pleasures. Almost all the pleasures of the 



I.] VENICE. 5 

place are simple; this may be maintained even 
under the imputation of ingenious paradox. There 
is no simpler pleasure than looking at a fine Titian 
— unless it be looking at a fine Tintoret, or stroll- 
ing into St. Mark's — it is abominable, the way one 
falls into the habit — and resting one's light- wearied 
eyes upon the windowless gloom ; or than floating 
in a gondola, or hanging over a balcony, or taking 
one's coffee at Florian's. It is of these superficial 
pastimes that a Venetian day is composed, and the 
pleasure of the matter is in the emotions to which 
they minister. These, fortunately, are of the finest ; 
otherwise, Venice would be insufferably dull. Bead- 
ing Euskin is good; reading the old records is, 
perhaps, better ; but the best thing of all is simply 
staying on. The only way to care for Venice as 
she deserves it, is to give her a chance to touch 
you often — to linger and remain and return. 

II. 

The danger is that you will not linger enough — 
a danger of which the author of these lines had 
known something. It is possible to dislike Venice, 
and to entertain the sentiment in a responsible and 
intelligent manner. There are travellers who think 
the place odious, and those who are not of this 
opinion often find themselves wishing that the others 
were only more numerous. The sentimental tourist's 
only quarrel with his Venice is that he has too many 
competitors there. He likes to be alone; to be 
original; to have (to himself, at least) the air of 
making discoveries. The Venice of to-day is a 



6 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [i. 

vast museum where the little wicket that admits 
you is perpetually turning and creaking, and yon 
march through the institution with a herd of fellow- 
gazers. There is nothing left to discover or describe, 
and originality of attitude is completely impossible. 
This is often very annoying ; you can only turn 
your back on your impertinent playfellow and 
curse his want of delicacy. But this is not the 
fault of Venice ; it is the fault of the rest of the 
world. The fault of Venice is that, though it is 
easy to admire it, it is not so easy to live in it. 
After you have been there a week, and the bloom 
of novelty has rubbed off, you wonder whether you 
can accommodate yourself to the peculiar condi- 
tions. Your old habits become impracticable, and 
you find yourself obliged to form new ones of an 
undesirable and unprofitable character. You are 
tired of your gondola (or you think you are), and 
you have seen all the principal pictures and heard 
the names of the palaces announced a dozen times 
by your gondolier, who brings them out almost as 
impressively as if he were an English butler bawl- 
ing titles into a drawing-room. You have walked 
several hundred times round the Piazza, and bought 
several bushels of photographs. You have visited 
the antiquity- mongers whose horrible sign -boards 
dishonour some of the grandest vistas in the Grand 
Canal ; you have tried the opera and found it very 
bad ; you have bathed at the Lido and found the 
water flat. You have begun to have a shipboard- 
feeling — to regard the Piazza as an enormous saloon 
and the Eiva degli Schiavoni as a promenade-deck. 
Yon are obstructed and encaged; your desire for 



I.] VENICE. 7 

space is unsatisfied ; you miss your usual exercise, 
You try to take a walk, and you fail, and meantime, 
as I say, you have come to regard your gondola as a 
sort of magnified baby's cradle. You have no desire 
to be rocked to sleep, though you are sufficiently 
kept awake by the irritation produced, as you gaze 
across the shallow lagoon, by the attitude of the 
perpetual gondolier, with his turned -out toes, his 
protruded chin, his absurdly unscientific stroke. 
The canals have a horrible smell, and the everlast- 
ing Piazza, where you have looked repeatedly at 
every article in every shop-window and found them 
all rubbish, where the young Venetians who sell 
bead -bracelets and "panoramas" are perpetually 
thrusting their wares at you, where the same tightly- 
buttoned officers are for ever sucking the same black 
weeds, at the same empty tables, in front of the same 
caffhs — the Piazza, as I say, has resolved itself into 
a sort of magnificent tread-mill. This is the state 
of mind of those shallow inquirers who find Venice 
all very well for a week ; and if in such a state of 
mind you take your departure, you act with fatal 
rashness. The loss is your own, moreover ; it is 
not — with all deference to your personal attractions 
— that of your companions who remain behind ; 
for though there are some disagreeable things in 
Venice, there is nothing so disagreeable as the visi- 
tors. The conditions are peculiar, but your intoler- 
ance of them evaporates before it has had time to 
become a prejudice. "When you have called for the 
bill to go, pay it and remain, and you will find on 
the morrow that you are deeply attached to Venice. 
It is by living there from day to day that you feel 



8 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [i. 

the fulness of its charm ; that you invite its exqui- 
site influence to sink into your spirit. The place is 
as changeable as a nervous woman, and you know it 
only when you know all the aspects of its beauty. 
It has high spirits or low, it is pale or red, gray or 
pink, cold or warm, fresh or wan, according to the 
weather or the hour. It is always interesting and 
almost always sad ; but it has a thousand occasional 
graces and is always liable to happy accidents. 
You become extraordinarily fond of these things; 
you count upon them ; they make part of your life. 
Tenderly fond you become ; there is something inde- 
finable in those depths of personal acquaintance that 
gradually establish themselves. The place seems to 
personify itself, to become human and sentient, and 
conscious of your affection. You desire to embrace 
it, to caress it, to possess it ; and finally, a soft sense 
of possession grows up, and your visit becomes a 
perpetual love-affair. It is very true that if you go 
there, like the author of these lines, about the middle 
of March, a certain amount of disappointment is 
possible. He had not been there for several years, 
and in the interval the beautiful and helpless city 
had suffered an increase of injury. The barbarians 
are in full possession, and you tremble for what 
they may do. You are reminded, from the moment 
of your arrival, that Venice scarcely exists any more 
as a city at all ; that it exists only as a battered 
peep-show and bazaar. There was a horde of savage 
Germans encamped in the Piazza, and they filled the 
Ducal Palace and the Academy with their uproar. 
The English and Americans came a little later. 
They came in good time, with a great many French, 



I.] VENICE. 9 

who were discreet enough to make very long repasts 
at the Caffe Quadri, during which they were out of 
the way. The months of April and May of the 
year 1881 were not, as a general thing, a favour- 
able season for visiting the Ducal Palace and the 
Academy. The valet-de-place had marked them for 
his own, and held triumphant possession of them. 
He celebrates his triumphs in a terrible brassy 
voice, which resounds all over the place, and has, 
whatever language he be speaking, the accent of 
some other idiom. During all the spring months in 
Venice these gentry abound in the great resorts, and 
they lead their helpless captives through churches 
and galleries in dense irresponsible groups. They 
infest the Piazza ; they pursue you along the Eiva ; 
they hang about the bridges and the doors of the 
caffds. In saying just now that I was disappointed 
at first, I had chiefly in mind the impression that 
assails me to-day in the whole precinct of St. 
Mark's. The condition of this ancient sanctuary 
is surely a great scandal. The pedlars and com- 
missioners ply their trade — often a very unclean 
one — at the very door of the temple ; they follow 
you across the threshold, into the sacred dusk, and 
pull your sleeve, and hiss into your ear, scuffling 
with each other for customers. There is a great 
deal of dishonour about St. Mark's altogether, and 
if Venice, as I say, has become a great bazaar, this 
exquisite edifice is now the biggest booth. 



10 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [i. 



III. 

It is treated as a booth in all ways, and if it had 
not, somehow, a great spirit of solemnity within it, 
the traveller would soon have little warrant for 
regarding it as a religious affair. The restoration 
of the outer walls, which has lately been so much 
attacked and defended, is certainly a great shock. 
Of the necessity of the work only an expert is, I 
suppose, in a position to judge; but there is no 
doubt that, if a necessity it be, it is one that is 
deeply to be regretted. To no more distressing 
necessity have people of taste lately had to resign 
themselves. Wherever the hand of the restorer has 
been laid all semblance of beauty has vanished; 
which is a sad fact, considering that the external 
loveliness of St. Mark's has been for ages less impres- 
sive only than that of the still comparatively unin- 
jured interior. I know not what is the measure of 
necessity in such a case, and it appears indeed to 
be a very delicate question. To-day, at any rate, 
that admirable harmony of faded mosaic and marble, 
which, to the eye of the traveller emerging from the 
narrow streets that lead to the Piazza, filled all the 
farther end of it with a sort of dazzling, silvery pre- 
sence — to-day this lovely vision is in a way to be 
completely reformed and, indeed, well-nigh abolished. 
The old softness and mellowness of colour — the 
work of the quiet centuries and of the breath of 
the salt sea — is giving way to large crude patches 
of new material, which have the effect of a mon- 
strous malady rather than of a restoration to health. 



I.I VENICE. 11 

They look like blotches of red and white paint 
and dishonourable smears of chalk on the cheeks of 
a noble matron. The face toward the Piazzetta is 
in especial the newest-looking thing conceivable — 
as new as a new pair of boots, or as the morning's 
paper. We do not profess, however, to undertake 
a scientific quarrel with these changes ; we admit 
that our complaint is a purely sentimental one. 
The march of industry in united Italy must doubt- 
less be looked at as a whole, and one must endeavour 
to believe that it is through innumerable lapses of 
taste that this deeply interesting country is groping 
her way to her place among the nations. For the 
present, it is not to be denied, certain odd phases 
of the process are more visible than the result, to 
arrive at which it seems necessary that, as she was 
of old a passionate votary of the beautiful, she should 
to-day burn everything that she has adored. It 
is, doubtless, too soon to judge her, and there are 
moments when one is willing to forgive her even 
the restoration of St. Mark's. Inside, as well, there 
has been a considerable attempt to make the place 
more tidy ; but the general effect, as yet, has not 
seriously suffered. What I chiefly remember is the 
straightening out of that dark and rugged old pave- 
ment — those deep undulations of primitive mosaic, 
in which the wondering tourist was thought to per- 
ceive an intended resemblance to the waves of the 
ocean. Whether intended or not, the analogy was 
an image the more in a treasure-house of images ; 
but from a considerable portion of the church it 
has now disappeared. Throughout the greater part, 
indeed, the pavement remains as recent generations 



12 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [i, 

have known it — dark, rich, cracked, uneven, spotted 
with porphyry and time -blackened malachite, an(? 
polished by the knees of innumerable worshippers ; 
but in other large sections the idea imitated by the 
restorers is that of the ocean in a dead calm, and the 
model they have taken, the floor of a London club- 
house or of a New York hotel. I think no Venetian 
and scarcely any Italian cares much for such differ- 
ences ; and when, a year ago, people in England 
were writing to the Times about the whole business, 
and holding meetings to protest against it, the dear 
children of the lagoon (so far as they heard, or 
heeded, the rumour) thought them partly busy- 
bodies and partly asses. Busy-bodies they doubt- 
less were, but they took a good deal of disinterested 
trouble. It never occurs to the Venetian mind of 
to-day that such trouble may be worth taking; the 
Venetian mind vainly endeavours to conceive a 
state of existence in which personal questions are 
so insipid that people have to look for grievances 
in the wrongs of brick and marble. I must not, 
however, speak of St. Mark's as if I had the preten- 
sion of giving a description of it, or as if the reader 
desired one. The reader has been too well served 
already. It is surely the best -described building 
in the world. Open the Stones of Venice, open 
The"ophile Gautier's Italia, and you will see. These 
writers take it very seriously, and it is only because 
there is another way of taking it that I venture 
to speak of it ; the way that offers itself after you 
have been in Venice a couple of months, and the 
light is hot in the great Square, and you pass in 
under the pictured porticoes with a feeling of habit 



I.] VENICE. 13 

and friendliness, and a desire for something cool 
and dark. There are moments, after all, when the 
church is comparatively quiet and empty, when 
you may sit there with an easy consciousness of its 
beauty. From the moment, of course, that you go 
into any Italian church for any purpose but to say 
your prayers or look at the ladies, you rank your- 
self among the trooping barbarians I just spoke of ; 
you treat the place like an orifice in the peep-show. 
Still, it is almost a spiritual function — or, at the 
worst, an amorous one — to feed one's eyes on the 
moulten colour that drops from the hollow vaults and 
thickens the air with its richness. It is all so quiet 
and sad and faded ; and yet it is all so brilliant and 
living. The strange figures in the mosaic pictures, 
bending with the curve of niche and vault, stare 
down through the glowing dimness ; and the bur- 
nished gold that stands behind them catches the 
light on its little uneven cubes. St. Mark's owes 
nothing of its character to the beauty of proportion 
or perspective ; there is nothing grandly balanced 
or far-arching ; there are no long lines nor triumphs 
of the perpendicular. The church arches indeed; 
but it arches like a dusky cavern. Beauty of sur- 
face, of tone, of detail, of things near enough to touch 
and kneel upon and lean against — it is from this 
the effect proceeds. In this sort of beauty the place 
is incredibly rich, and you may go there every day 
and find afresh some lurking pictorial nook. It is 
a treasury of bits, as the painters say; and there 
are usually three or four painters, with their easels 
set up in uncertain equilibrium on the undulating 
floor. It is not easy to catch the real complexion 



14 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [i. 

of St. Mark's, and these laudable attempts at por- 
traiture are apt to look either lurid or livid. But, 
if you cannot paint the old loose-looking marble 
slabs, the great panels of basalt and jasper, the 
crucifixes, of which the lonely anguish looks deeper 
in the vertical light, the tabernacles whose open 
doors disclose a dark Byzantine image, spotted with 
dull, crooked gems — if you cannot paint these things, 
you can at least grow fond of them. You grow 
fond even of the old benches of red marble, partly 
worn away by the breeches of many generations, 
and attached to the base of those wide pilasters, 
of which the precious plating, delightful in its faded 
brownness, with a faint gray bloom upon it, bulges 
and yawns a little with honourable age. 

IV. 

Even at first, when the vexatious sense of the 
city of the Doges having been reduced to earning its 
living as a curiosity-shop was in its keenness, there 
was a great deal of entertainment to be got from 
lodging on the Eiva degli Schiavoni and looking 
out at the far-shimmering lagoon. There was enter- 
tainment indeed in simply getting into the place 
and observing the queer incidents of a Venetian 
installation. A great many persons contribute in- 
directly to this undertaking, and it is surprising 
how they spring out at you during your novitiate 
to remind you that they are bound up in some 
mysterious manner with the constitution of your 
little establishment. It was an interesting problem, 
for instance, to trace the subtle connection existing 



I.] VENICE. IB 

between the niece of the landlady and the occu- 
pancy of the fourth floor. Superficially, it was not 
easily visible, as the young lady in question was a 
dancer at the Fenice theatre — or, when that was 
closed, at the Eossini — -and might have been sup- 
posed to be absorbed by her professional duties. 
It proved to be necessary, however, that she should 
hover about the premises in a velvet jacket and 
a pair of black kid gloves, with one little white 
button ; as also, that she should apply a thick 
coating of powder to her face, which had a charm- 
ing oval and a sweet, weak expression, like that of 
most of the Venetian maidens, who, as a general 
thing (it was not a peculiarity of the landlady's 
niece), are fond of besmearing themselves with flour. 
It soon became plain that it is not only the many- 
twinkling lagoon that you behold from a habitation 
on the Eiva ; you see a little of everything Venetian. 
Straight across, before my windows, rose the great 
pink mass of San Giorgio Maggiore, which, for an 
ugly Palladian church, has a success beyond all 
reason. It is a success of position, of colour, of 
the immense detached Campanile, tipped with a 
tall gold angel. I know not whether it is because 
San Giorgio is so grandly conspicuous, and because 
it has a great deal of worn, faded-looking brickwork ; 
but for many persons the whole place has a kind 
of suffusion of rosiness. If we were asked what is 
the leading colour at Venice we should say pink, 
and yet, after all, we cannot remember that this 
elegant tint occurs very often. It is a faint, shim- 
mering, airy, watery pink; the bright sea-light seems 
to flush with it, and the pale whitish -green of 



16 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [i. 

lagoon and canal to drink it in. There is, indeed, 
in Venice a great deal of very evident brickwork, 
which is never fresh or loud in colour, but always 
burnt out, as it were, always exquisitely mild. There 
are certain little mental pictures that rise before 
the sentimental tourist at the simple mention, written 
or spoken, of the places he has loved. When I 
hear, when I see, the magical name I have written 
above these pages, it is not of the great Square that 
I think, with its strange basilica and its high 
arcades, nor of the wide mouth of the Grand Canal, 
with the stately steps and the well-poised dome of 
the Salute; it is not of the low lagoon, nor the 
sweet Piazzetta, nor the dark chambers of St. 
Mark's. I simply see a narrow canal in the heart 
of the city — a patch of green water and a surface of 
pink wall. The gondola moves slowly ; it gives a 
great, smooth swerve, passes under a bridge, and the 
gondolier's cry, carried over the quiet water, makes 
a kind of splash in the stillness. A girl is passing 
over the little bridge, which has an arch like a camel's 
back, with an old shawl on her head, which makes 
her look charming; you see her against the sky as 
you float beneath. The pink of the old wall seems to 
fill the whole place ; it sinks even into the opaque 
water. Behind the wall is a garden, out of which 
the long arm of a white June rose — the roses of 
Venice are splendid — has flung itself by way of 
spontaneous ornament. On the other side of this 
small water-way is a great shabby facade of Gothic 
windows and balconies — balconies on which dirty 
clothes are hung and under which a cavernous-look- 
ing doorway opens from a low flight of slimy water- 



L] VENICE. 17 

steps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a 
queer smell, and the whole place is enchanting. It 
is poor work, however, talking about the colour of 
things in Venice. The sentimental tourist is per- 
petually looking at it from his window, when he is 
not floating about with that delightful sense of 
being for the moment a part of it. which any gentle- 
man in a gondola is free to entertain. Venetian 
windows and balconies are a dreadful lure, and 
while you rest your elbows on these cushioned 
ledges the precious hours fly away. But, in truth, 
Venice is not, in fair weather, a place for concen- 
tration of mind. The effort required for sitting down 
to a writing-table is heroic, and the brightest page of 
MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy of your milieu. 
.All nature beckons you forth, and murmurs to you 
sophistically that such hours should be devoted to 
collecting impressions. Afterward, in ugly places, 
at unprivileged times, you can convert your impres- 
sions into prose. Fortunately for the present proser, 
the weather was not always fine; the first month 
was wet and windy, and it was better to look at 
the lagoon from an open casement than to respond 
to the advances of persuasive gondoliers. Even 
then, however, there was a constant entertainment 
in the view. It was all cold colour, and the steel- 
gray floor of the lagoon was stroked the wrong way 
by the wind. Then there were charming cool in- 
tervals, when the churches, the houses, the anchored 
fishing -boats, the whole gently-curving line of the 
Kiva, seemed to be washed with a pearly white. 
Later it all turned warm — warm to the eye as well 
as to other senses. After the middle of May the 

c 



18 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [l. 

whole place was in a glow. The sea took on a 
thousand shades, but they were only infinite varia- 
tions of blue, and those rosy walls I just spoke of 
began to flush in the thick sunshine. Every patch 
of colour, every yard of weather-stained stucco, 
every glimpse of nestling garden or daub of sky 
above a calle, began to shine and sparkle — began, 
as the painters say, to " compose." The lagoon was 
streaked with odd currents, which played across it 
like huge, smooth finger-marks. The gondolas mul- 
tiplied and spotted it all over ; every gondola and 
every gondolier looking, at a distance, precisely like 
every other. There is something strange and fas- 
cinating in this mysterious impersonality of the 
gondola. It has an identity when you are in it, 
but, thanks to their all being of the same size, 
shape, and colour, and of the same deportment and 
gait, it has none, or as little as possible, as you 
see it pass before you. From my windows on 
the Eiva there was always the same silhouette — v 
the long, black, slender skiff, lifting its head and 
throwing it back a little, moving yet seeming not 
to move, with the grotesquely-graceful figure on the 
poop. This figure inclines, as may be, more to the 
graceful or to the grotesque — standing in the " second 
position" of the dancing-master, but indulging, from 
the waist upward, in a freedom of movement which 
that functionary would deprecate. One may say, as 
a general thing, that there is something rather awk- 
ward in the movement of even the most graceful 
gondolier, and something graceful in the movement 
of the most awkward. In the graceful men of 
course the grace predominates, and nothing can be 



».] VENICE. 19 

finer than the large firm way in which, from their 
point of vantage, they throw themselves over their 
tremendous oar. It has the boldness of a plunging 
bird, and the regularity of a pendulum. Sometimes, 
as you see this movement in profile, in a gondola 
that passes you — see, as you recline on your own 
low cushions, the arching body of the gondolier 
lifted up against the sky — it has a kind of noble- 
ness which suggests an image on a Greek frieze. 
The gondolier at Venice is your very good friend — 
if you choose him happily — and on the quality of 
the personage depends a good deal that of your im- 
pressions. He is a part of your daily life, your 
double, your shadow, your complement. Most 
people, I think, either like their gondolier or hate 
him ; and if they like him, like him very much. 
In this case they take an interest in him after his 
departure ; wish him to be sure of employment, 
speak of him as the gem of gondoliers, and tell their 
friends to be certain to "secure" him. There is 
usually no difficulty in securing him; there is 
nothing elusive or reluctant about a gondolier. 
They are, for the most part, excellent fellows, and 
the sentimental tourist must always have a kind- 
ness for them. More than the rest of the popula- 
tion, of course, they are the children of Venice ; 
they are associated with its idiosyncrasy, with its 
essence, with its silence, with its melancholy. When 
I say they are associated with its silence, I should 
immediately add that they are associated also with 
its sound. Among themselves they are an extra- 
ordinarily talkative company. They chatter at the 
traghetti, where they always have some sharp point 



20 PORTEAITS OF PLACES. [i. 

under discussion ; they bawl across the canals ; they 
bespeak your commands as you approach ; they defy 
each other from afar. If you happen to have a 
traghetto under your window, you are well aware 
that they are a vocal race. I should go even 
farther than I went just now, and say that the voice 
of the gondolier is, in fact, the sound of Venice. 
There is scarcely any other, and that, indeed, is part 
of the interest of the place. There is no noise there 
save distinctly human noise ; no rumbling, no vague 
uproar, nor rattle of wheels and hoofs. It is all 
articulate, personal sound. One may say, indeed, 
that Venice is, emphatically, the city of conversa- 
tion ; people talk all over the place, because there 
is nothing to interfere with their being heard. 
Among the populace it is a kind of family party. 
The still water carries the voice, and good Venetians 
exchange confidences at a distance of half a mile. 
It saves a world of trouble, and they don't like 
trouble. Their delightful garrulous language helps 
them to make Venetian life a long conversazione. 
This language, with its soft elisions, its odd trans- 
positions, its kindly contempt for consonants and 
other disagreeables, has in it something peculiarly 
human and accommodating. If your gondolier had 
no other merit, he would have the merit that he 
speaks Venetian. This may rank as a merit, even 
— some people perhaps would say especially — when 
you don't understand what he says. But he adds 
to it other graces which make him an agreeable 
feature in your life. The price he sets on his 
services is touchingly small, and he has a happy 
art of being obsequious, without being, or, at least, 



I.] VENICE. 21 

without seeming, abject. For occasional liberalities 
he evinces an almost lyrical gratitude. In short, 
he has delightfully good manners, a merit which he 
shares, for the most part, with Venetians at large. 
One grows very fond of these people, and the reason 
of one's fondness is the frankness and sweetness of 
their address. That of the Italian people, in general, 
has much to recommend it; but in the Venetian 
manner there is something peculiarly ingratiating. 
One feels that the race is old, that it has a long 
and rich civilisation in its blood, and that if it has 
not been blessed by fortune, it has at least been 
polished by time. It has not a genius for morality, 
and indeed makes few pretensions in that direction. 
It scruples not to represent the false as the true, 
and is liable to confusion in the attribution of pro- 
perty. It is peculiarly susceptible to the tender 
sentiment, which it cultivates with a graceful dis- 
regard of the more rigid formalities. I am not sure 
that it is very brave, and was not struck with its 
being very industrious. But it has an unfailing 
sense of the amenities of life ; the poorest Venetian 
is a natural man of the world. He is better com- 
pany than persons of his class are apt to be among 
the nations of industry and virtue — where people 
are also, sometimes, perceived to lie and steal. He 
has a great desire to please and to be pleased. 



In this latter point the cold-blooded stranger 
begins at last to imitate him ; he begins to lead a 
life that is, before all things, good-humoured : unless, 



22 PORTKAITS OF PLACES. [h 

indeed, he allow himself, like Mr. Buskin, to be put 
out of his good -humour by Titian and Tiepolo. 
The hours he spends among the pictures are his 
best hours in Yenice, and I am ashamed of myself 
to have written so much of common things when 
I might have been making festoons of the names 
of the masters. But, when we have covered our 
page with such festoons, what more is left to say ? 
When one has said Carpaccio and Bellini, the 
Tintoret and the Veronese, one has struck a note 
that must be left to resound at will. Everything 
has been said about the mighty painters, and it is 
of little importance to record that one traveller the 
more has found them to his taste. "Went this 
morning to the Academy ; was very much pleased 
with Titian's ' Assumption.' " That honest phrase 
has doubtless been written in many a traveller's 
diary, and was not indiscreet on the part of its 
author. But it appeals little to the general reader, 
and we must, moreover, not expose our deepest 
feelings. Since I have mentioned Titian's "As- 
sumption," I must say that there are some people 
who have been less pleased with it than the gentle- 
man we have just imagined. It is one of the pos- 
sible disappointments of Venice, and you may, if 
you like, take advantage of your privilege of not 
caring for it. It imparts a look of great richness 
to the side of the beautiful room of the Academy 
on which it hangs ; but the same room contains 
two or three works less known to fame which are 
equally capable of inspiring a passion. " The 
' Annunciation ' struck me as coarse and super- 
ficial " : that was once written in a simple-minded 



I.] VENICE. 25 

traveller's note-book. At Venice, strange to say, 
Titian is altogether a disappointment ; the city of 
his adoption is far from containing the best of him. 
Madrid, Paris, London, Florence, Dresden, Munich 
— these are the homes of his greatness. There are 
other painters who have but a single home, and the 
greatest of these is the Tintoret. Close beside him 
sit Carpaccio and Bellini, who make with him the 
dazzling Venetian trio. The Veronese may be seen 
and measured in other places ; he is most splendid 
in Venice, but he shines in Paris and in Dresden. 
You may walk out of the noon-clay dusk of Tra- 
falgar Square in November, and in one of the 
chambers of the National Gallery see the family of 
Darius rustling and pleading and weeping at the 
feet of Alexander. Alexander is a beautiful young 
Venetian in crimson pantaloons, and the picture 
sends a glow into the cold London twilight. You 
may sit before it for an hour, and dream you are 
floating to the water-gate of the Ducal Palace, where 
a certain old beggar, with one of the handsomest 
heads in the world — he has sat to a hundred painters 
for Doges, and for personages more sacred — has a 
prescriptive right to pretend to pull your gondola 
to the steps and to hold out a greasy, immemorial 
cap. But you must go to Venice, in fact, to see 
the other masters, who form part of your life while 
you are there, and illuminate your view of the 
universe. It is difficult to express one's relation to 
them ; for the whole Venetian art- world is so near, 
so familiar, so much an extension and adjunct of 
the actual world, that it seems almost invidious to 
say one owes more to one of them than to another 



24 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. U 

Nowhere (not even in Holland, where the corre- 
spondence between the real aspects and the little 
polished canvases is so constant and so exquisite) 
do art and life seem so interfused and, as it were, 
so consanguineous. All the splendour of light and 
colour, all the Venetian air and the Venetian history, 
are on the walls and ceilings of the palaces ; and all 
the genius of the masters, all the images and visions 
they have left upon canvas, seem to tremble in the 
sunbeams and dance upon the waves. That is the 
perpetual interest of the place — that you live in a 
certain sort of knowledge as in a rosy cloud. You 
don't go into the churches and galleries by way of 
a change from the streets ; you go into them because 
they offer you an exquisite reproduction of the 
things that surround you. All Venice was both 
model and painter, and life was so pictorial that art 
could not help becoming so. With all diminutions 
life is pictorial still, and this fact gives an extra- 
ordinary freshness to one's perception of the great 
Venetian works. You judge of them not as a con- 
noisseur, but as a man of the world, and you enjoy 
them because they are so social and so actual. 
Perhaps, of all works of art that are equally great, 
they demand least reflection on the part of the 
spectator — they make least of a mystery of being 
enjoyed. KefLection only confirms your admiration 
but it is almost ashamed to show its head. These 
things speak so frankly and benignantly to the sense 
that we feel there is reason as well in such an 
address. But it is hard, as I say, to express all 
this, and it is painful as well to attempt it — painful, 
because in the memory of vanished hours so filled 



I.] VENICE. 25 

with beauty the sense of present loss is over- 
whelming. Exquisite hours, enveloped in light and 
silence, to have known them once is to have always 
a terrible standard of enjoyment. Certain lovely 
mornings of May and June come back with an in- 
effaceable fairness. Venice is not smothered in 
flowers at this season, in the manner of Florence 
and Kome; but the sea and sky themselves seem 
to blossom and rustle. The gondola waits at the 
wave- washed steps, and if you are wise you will take 
your place beside a discriminating companion. Such 
a companion, in Venice, should, of course, be of the 
sex that discriminates most finely. An intelligent 
woman who knows her Venice seems doubly intelli- 
gent, and it makes no woman's perceptions less keen 
to be aware that she cannot help looking graceful 
as she glides over the waves. The handsome Pas- 
quale, with uplifted oar, awaits your command, 
knowing, in a general way, from observation of your 
habits, that your intention is to go to see a picture 
or two. It perhaps does not immensely matter what 
picture you choose : the whole affair is so charming. 
It is charming to wander through the light and 
shade of intricate canals, with perpetual architecture 
above you and perpetual fluidity beneath. It is 
charming to disembark at the polished steps of a 
little empty campo — a sunny, shabby square, with 
an old well in the middle, an old church on one side, 
and tall Venetian windows looking down. Some- 
times the windows are tenantless ; sometimes a 
lady in a faded dressing-gown is leaning vaguely 
on the sill. There is always an old man holding 
out his hat for coppers ; there are always three or 



26 PORTKAITS OF PLACES. [i. 

four small boys dodging possible umbrella-pokes while 
they precede you, in the manner of custodians, to the 
door of the church. 

VI. 

The churches of Venice are rich in pictures, and 
many a masterpiece lurks in the unaccommodating 
gloom of side-chapels and sacristies. Many a noble 
work is perched behind the dusty candles and muslin 
roses of a scantily- visited altar ; some of them, in- 
deed, are hidden behind the altar, in a darkness 
that can never be explored. The facilities offered 
you for approaching the picture, in such cases, are 
a kind of mockery of your irritated desire. You 
stand on tip-toe on a three-legged stool, you climb 
a rickety ladder, you almost mount upon the 
shoulders of the custode. You do everything but 
see the picture You see just enough to perceive 
that it is beautiful. You catch a glimpse of a 
divine head, of a fig-tree against a mellow sky ; but 
the rest is impenetrable mystery. You renounce 
all hope, for instance, of approaching the magnificent 
Cima da Conegliano in San Giovanni in Bragora ; 
and bethinking yourself of the immaculate purity 
that dwells in the works of this master, you re- 
nounce it with chagrin and pain. Behind the high 
altar, in that church, there hangs a Baptism of Christ, 
by Cima, which, I believe, has been more or less 
repainted. You can make the thing out in spots ; 
you can see that it has a fulness of perfection. But 
you turn away from it with a stiff neck, and pro- 
mise yourself consolation in the Academy and at 
the Madonna dell' Orto, where two noble pictures, 



t] VENICE. 27 

by the same hand — pictures as clear as a summer 
twilight — present themselves in better circum- 
stances. It may be said, as a general thing, that 
you never see the Tintoret. You admire him, you 
adore him, you think him the greatest of painters, 
but, in the great majority of cases, you don't see 
him. This is partly his own fault ; so many of his 
works have turned to blackness and are positively 
rotting in their frames. At the Scuola di San 
Rocco, where there are acres of the Tintoret, there is 
scarcely anything at all adequately visible save the 
immense " Crucifixion " in the upper story. It is 
true that in looking at this huge composition you 
look at many pictures ; it has not only a multitude 
of figures, but a wealth of episodes ; and you pass 
from one of these to the other as if you were " doing " 
a gallery. Surely, no single picture in the world 
contains more of human life ; there is everything 
in it, including the most exquisite beauty. It is 
one of the greatest things of art; it is always 
interesting. There are pictures by the Tintoret 
which contain touches more exquisite, revelations of 
beauty more radiant, but there is no other vision of 
so intense a reality and an execution so splendid. The 
interest, the impressiveness, of that whole corner 
of Venice, however melancholy the effect of its 
gorgeous and ill-lighted chambers, gives a strange 
importance to a visit to the Scuola. Nothing that 
all travellers go to see appears to suffer less from 
the incursions of travellers. It is one of the lone- 
liest booths of the bazaar, and the author of these 
lines has always had the good fortune, which he 
wishes to every other traveller, of having it to him- 



28 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [i. 

self. I think most visitors find the place rather 
alarming and wicked-looking. They walk about a 
while among the fitful figures that gleam here and 
there out of the great tapestry (as it were) with 
which the painter has hung all the walls, and then, 
depressed and bewildered by the portentous solem- 
nity of these objects, by strange glimpses of un- 
natural scenes, by the echo of their lonely footsteps 
on the vast stone floors, they take a hasty departure, 
and find themselves again, with a sense of release 
from danger, and of the genius loci having been a 
sort of mad white- washer, who worked with a bad 
mixture, in the bright light of the campo, among the 
beggars, the orange -vendors, and the passing gon- 
dolas. Solemn, indeed, is the place, solemn and 
strangely suggestive, for the simple reason that we 
shall scarcely find four walls elsewhere that inclose 
within a like area an equal quantity of genius. 
The air is thick with it, and dense and difficult to 
breathe; for it was genius that was not happy, 
inasmuch as it lacked the art to fix itself for ever. 
It is not immortality that we breathe at the Scuola 
di San Eocco, but conscious, reluctant mortality. 
Fortunately, however, we have the Ducal Palace, 
where everything is so brilliant and splendid that 
the poor dusky Tintoret is lifted in spite of himself 
into the concert. This deeply original building is, 
of course, the loveliest thing in Venice, and a morn- 
ing's stroll there is a wonderful illumination. Cun- 
ningly select your hour — half the enjoyment of 
Venice is a question of dodging — and go at about 
one o'clock, when the tourists have gone to lunch 
and the echoes of the charming chambers have 



I.] VENICE. 29 

gone to sleep among the sunbeams. There is no 
brighter place in Venice ; by which I mean that, on 
the whole, there is none half so bright. The reflected 
sunshine plays up through the great windows from 
the glittering lagoon, and shimmers and Winkles 
over gilded walls and ceilings. All the history of 
Venice, all its splendid, stately past, glows around 
you in a strong sea -light. Every one here is 
magnificent, but the great Veronese is the most 
magnificent of all. He swims before you in a silver 
cloud ; he thrones in an eternal morning. The 
deep blue sky burns behind him, streaked across 
with milky bars ; the white colonnades sustain the 
richest canopies, under which the first gentlemen 
and ladies in the world both render homage and 
receive it. Their glorious garments rustle in the air 
of the sea, and their sun-lighted faces are the very 
complexion of Venice. The mixture of pride and 
piety, of politics and religion, of art and patriotism, 
gives a magnificent dignity to every scene. Never 
was a painter more nobly joyous, never did an artist 
take a greater delight in life, seeing it all as a kind 
of breezy festival and feeling it through the medium 
of perpetual success. He revels in the gold-framed 
ovals of the ceilings, with the fluttering movement 
of an embroidered banner that tosses itself into the 
blue. He was the happiest of painters, and he 
produced the happiest picture in the world. The 
* Eape of Europa " surely deserves this title ; it is 
impossible to look at it without aching with envy. 
Nowhere else in art is such a temperament revealed ; 
never did inclination and opportunity combine to 
express such enjoyment. The mixture of flowers 



30 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [i. 

and gems and brocade, of blooming flesh and shining 
sea and waving groves, of youth, health, movement, 
desire — all this is the brightest vision that ever 
descended upon the soul of a painter. Happy the 
artist who could entertain such a vision ; happy the 
artist who could paint it as the " Eape of Europa " 
is painted. The Tintoret's visions were not so 
bright as that ; but he had several that were radiant 
enough. In the room that contains the " Eape of 
Europa " are several smaller canvases by the greatly 
more complex genius of the Scuola di San Eocco, 
which are almost simple in their loveluvess, almost 
happy in their simplicity. They have kept their 
brightness through the centuries, and they shine 
with their neighbours in those golden rooms. Therr 
is a piece of painting in one of them which is one of 
the sweetest things in Venice, and which reminds 
one afresh of those wild flowers of execution that 
bloom so profusely and so unheeded in the dark 
corners of all of the Tintoret's work. " Pallas chas-, 
ing away Mars " is, I believe, the name that is given 
to the picture ; and it represents in fact a young 
woman of noble appearance administering a gentle 
push to a fine young man in armour, as if to tell 
him to keep his distance. It is of the gentleness 
of this push that I speak, the charming way in 
which she puts out her arm, with a single bracelet 
on it, and rests her young hand, with its rosy fingers 
parted, upon his dark breastplate. She bends her 
enchanting head with the effort — a head which has 
all the strange fairness that the Tintoret always sees 
in women — and the soft, living, flesh-like glow of all 
these members, over which the brush has scarcely 



Lj VENICE. 31 

paused in its course, is as pretty an example of 
genius as all Venice can show. But why speak of 
the Tintoret when I can say nothing of the great 
" Paradise," which unfolds its somewhat smoky 
splendour, and the wonder of its multitudinous 
circles, in one of the other chambers ? If it were 
not one of the first pictures in the world, it would 
be about the biggest, and it must be confessed that 
at first the spectator gets from it chiefly an impres- 
sion of quantity. Then he sees that this quantity 
is really wealth ; that the dim confusion of faces is 
a magnificent composition, and that some of the 
details of this composition are supremely beautiful. 
It is impossible, however, in a retrospect of Venice, 
to specify one's happiest hours, though, as one looks 
backward, certain ineffaceable moments start here 
and there into vividness. How is it possible to 
forget one's visits to the sacristy of the Frari, how- 
ever frequent they may have been, and the great 
work of John Bellini which forms the treasure of 
that apartment? 

VII. 

Nothing in Venice is more perfect than this, and 
we know of no work of art more complete. The 
picture is in three compartments : the Virgin sits 
in the central division with her child; two vener- 
able saints, standing close together, occupy each of 
the others. It is impossible to imagine anything 
more finished or more ripe. It is one of those 
things that sum up the genius of a painter, the ex- 
perience of a life, the teaching of a school. It 
seems painted with molten gems, which have only 



32 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. \h 

been clarified by time, and it is as solemn as it is gor- 
geous, and as simple as it is deep. John Bellini is, 
more or less, everywhere in Venice, and wherever 
he is, he is almost certain to be first — first, I mean, 
in his own line ; he paints little else than the 
Madonna and the saints ; he has not Carpaccio's 
care for human life at large, nor the Tintoret's, nor 
that of the Veronese. Some of his greater pictures, 
however, where several figures are clustered together, 
have a richness of sanctity that is almost profane. 
There is one of them on the dark side of the room 
at the Academy, containing Titian's " Assumption," 
which, if we could only see it — its position is an 
inconceivable scandal — would evidently be one of 
the mightiest of so-called sacred pictures. So, too, 
is the Madonna of San Zaccaria, hung in a cold, 
dim, dreary place, ever so much too high, but so 
mild and serene, and so grandly disposed and 
accompanied, that the proper attitude for even the 
most critical amateur, as he looks at it, seems ta 
be the bended knee. There is another noble John 
Bellini, one of the very few in which there is no 
Virgin, at San Giovanni Crisostomo — a St. Jerome, 
in a red dress, sitting aloft upon the rocks, with a 
landscape of extraordinary purity behind him. The 
absence of the peculiarly erect Madonna makes it an 
interesting surprise among the works of the painter, 
and gives it a somewhat less strenuous air. But it 
has brilliant beauty, and the St. Jerome is a delightful 
old personage. The same church contains another 
great picture, for which he must find a shrine apart in 
his memory; one of the most interesting things he will 
have seen, if not the most brilliant. Nothing appeals 



I.] VENICE. 33 

more to him than three figures of Venetian ladies 
which occupy the foreground of a smallish canvas of 
Sebastian del Piombo, placed above the high altar 
of San Giovanni Crisostomo. Sebastian was a Vene- 
tian by birth, but few of his productions are to be 
seen in his native place ; few, indeed, are to be seen 
anywhere. The picture represents the patron-saint 
of the church, accompanied by other saints, and 
by the worldly votaries I have mentioned. These 
ladies stand together on the left, holding in their 
hands little white caskets ; two of them are in pro- 
file, but the foremost turns her face to the spectator. 
This face and figure are almost unique among the 
beautiful things of Venice, and they leave the sus- 
ceptible observer with the impression of having 
made, or rather having missed, a strange, a danger- 
ous, but a most valuable, acquaintance. The lady, 
who is superbly handsome, is the typical Venetian 
of the sixteenth century, and she remains in the 
mind as the perfect flower of that society. Never 
was there a greater air of breeding, a deeper expres- 
sion of tranquil superiority. She walks like a 
goddess — as if she trod, without sinking, the waves 
of the Adriatic. It is impossible to conceive a 
more perfect expression of the aristocratic spirit, 
either in its pride or in its benignity. This mag- 
nificent creature is so strong and secure that she 
is gentle, and so quiet that, in comparison, all minor 
assumptions of calmness suggest only a vulgar alarm. 
But for all this, there are depths of possible dis- 
order in her light-coloured eye. I had meant, how- 
ever, to say nothing about her, for it is not right to 
speak of Sebastian when one has not found room 

D 



34 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [t 

for Carpaccio. These visions come to one, and 
one can neither hold them nor brush them aside. 
Memories of Carpaccio, the magnificent, the delight- 
ful — it is not for want of such visitations, hut only 
for want of space, that I have not said of him what 
I would. There is little enough need of it for 
Carpaccio's sake, his fame being brighter to-day — 
thanks to the generous lamp Mr. Euskin has held 
up to it — than it has ever been. Yet there is some- 
thing ridiculous in talking of Venice without making 
him, almost, the refrain. He and the Tintoret are 
the two great realists, and it is hard to say which 
is the more human, the more various. The Tin- 
toret had the mightier temperament, but Carpaccio, 
who had the advantage of more newness and more 
responsibility, sailed nearer to perfection. Here and 
there he quite touches it, as in the enchanting picture, 
at the Academy, of St. Ursula asleep in her little 
white bed, in her high, clean room, where the angel 
visits her at dawn ; or in the noble St. Jerome in 
his study, at S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni. This latter 
work is a pearl of sentiment, and I may add, with- 
out being fantastic, a ruby of colour. It unites the 
most masterly finish with a kind of universal large- 
ness of feeling, and he who has it well in his memory 
will never hear the name of Carpaccio without a 
throb of almost personal affection. This, indeed, is 
the feeling that descends upon you in that wonder- 
ful little chapel of St. George of the Slaves, where 
this most personal and sociable of artists has ex- 
pressed all the sweetness of his imagination. The 
place is small and incommodious, the pictures are 
out of sight and ill-lighted, the custodian is rapa- 



L] VENICE. 35 

cious, the visitors are mutually intolerable, but the 
shabby little chapel is a palace of art. Mr. Buskin 
has written a pamphlet about it which is a real aid 
to enjoyment, though I cannot but think the gener- 
ous artist, with his keen senses and his just feeling, 
would have suffered at hearing his eulogist declare 
that one of his other productions — in the Museo 
Civico in Palazzo Correr, a delightful portrait of two 
Venetian ladies, with pet animals — is the " finest 
picture in the world." It has no need of that to 
be thought admirable ; and what more can a painter 
desire ? 

VIII. 

May in Venice is better than April, but Juno 
is best of all. Then the days are hot, but not too 
hot, and the nights are more beautiful than the days. 
Then Venice is rosier than ever in the morning, 
and more golden than ever as the day descends. 
It seems to expand and evaporate, to multiply all 
its reflections and iridescences. Then the life of 
its people and the strangeness of its constitution 
become a perpetual comedy, or, at least, a per- 
petual drama. Then the gondola is your sole 
habitation, and you spend days between sea and 
sky. You go to the Lido, though the Lido has been 
spoiled. When I was first in Venice, in 1869, it 
was a very natural place, and there was only a 
rough lane across the little island from the land- 
ing-place to the beach. There was a bathing-place 
in those days, and a restaurant, which was very bad, 
but where, in the warm evenings, your dinner did 
not much matter as you sat letting it cool upon 



36 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [t. 

the wooden terrace that stretched out into the sea. 
To-day the Lido is a part of united Italy, and has 
been made the victim of villainous improvements. 
A little cockney village has sprung up on its rural 
bosom, and a third-rate boulevard leads from Santa 
Elisabetta to the Adriatic. There are bitumen wall? 
and gas-lamps, lodging-houses, shops, and a teatro 
diurno. The bathing -establishment is bigger than 
before, and the restaurant as well ; but it is a com- 
pensation, perhaps, that the cuisine is no better. 
Such as it is, however, you will not scorn occa- 
sionally to partake of it on the breezy platform 
under which bathers dart and splash, and which 
looks out to where the fishing-boats, with sails of 
orange and crimson, wander along the darkening 
horizon. The beach at the Lido is still lonely and 
beautiful, and you can easily walk away from the 
cockney village. The return to Venice in the sun- 
set is classical and indispensable, and those who, 
at that glowing hour, have floated toward the 
towers that rise out of the lagoon, will not easily 
part with the impression. But you indulge in 
larger excursions — you go to Burano and Torcello, 
to Malamocco and Chioggia. Torcello, like the Lido, 
has been improved; the deeply interesting little 
cathedral of the eighth century, which stood there 
on the edge of the sea, as touching in its ruin, 
with its grassy threshold and its primitive mosaics, 
as the bleached bones of a human skeleton washed 
ashore by the tide, has now been restored and made 
cheerful, and the charm of the place, its strange and 
suggestive desolation, has well-nigh departed. It 
will still serve you as a pretext, however, for a day 



t] VENICE. 37 

on the lagoon, especially as you will disembark at 
Burano and admire the wonderful fisher-folk, whose 
good looks — and bad manners, I am sorry to say — 
can scarcely be exaggerated. Burano is celebrated 
for the beauty of its women and the rapacity of its 
children, and it is a fact that though some of the 
ladies are rather bold about it, every one of them 
shows you a handsome face. The children assail 
you for coppers, and, in their desire to be satisfied 
pursue your gondola into the sea. Chioggia is s 
larger Burano, and you carry away from either place 
a half-sad, half-cynical, but altogether pictorial im- 
pression ; the impression of bright-coloured hovels, 
of bathing in stagnant canals, of young girls with 
faces of a delicate shape and a susceptible expres- 
sion, with splendid heads of hair and complexions 
smeared with powder, faded yellow shawls that hang 
like old Greek draperies, and little wooden shoes 
that click as they go up and down the steps of the 
convex bridges; of brown -cheeked matrons with 
lustrous tresses and high tempers, massive throats 
encased with gold beads, and eyes that meet your 
own with a certain traditional defiance. The men 
throughout the islands of Venice are almost as hand- 
some as the women ; I have never seen so many 
good-looking fellows. At Burano and Chioggia 
they sit mending their nets, or lounge at the street 
corners, where conversation is always high-pitched, 
or clamour to you to take a boat ; and everywhere 
they decorate the scene with their splendid colour — 
cheeks and throats as richly brown as the sails of 
their fishing-smacks — their sea-faded tatters which 
are always a " costume" — their soft Venetian jargon, 



38 PORTEAITS OF PLACES. [i« 

and the gallantry with which they wear their hats 
— an article that nowhere sits so well as on a mass 
of dense Venetian curls. If you are happy, you will 
find yourself, after a June day in Venice (ahout ten 
o'clock), on a balcony that overhangs the Grand 
Canal, with your elbows on the broad ledge, a cigar- 
ette in your teeth, and a little good company beside 
you. The gondolas pass beneath, the watery surface 
gleams here and there from their lamps, some of 
which are coloured lanterns that move mysteriously 
in the darkness. There are some evenings in June 
when there are too many gondolas, too many lan- 
terns, too many serenades in front of the hotels. 
The serenading (in particular) is overdone ; but on 
such a balcony as I speak of you needn^ suffer from 
it, for in the apartment behind you — an accessible 
refuge — there is more good company, there are more 
cigarettes. If you are wise you will step back there 
presently. 



II. 

ITALY REVISITED. 

1877. 

I. 

I waited in Paris until after the elections for the 
new Chamber (they took place on the 14th of 
October) ; for only after one had learned that the 
celebrated attempt of Marshal MacMahon and his 
ministers to drive the French nation to the polls 
like a flock of huddling sheep, each with the white 
ticket of an official candidate round his neck, had 
not achieved the success which the energy of the 
process might have promised — only then was it 
possible to draw a long breath and deprive the 
republican party of such support as might have been 
conveyed in one's sympathetic presence. Seriously 
speaking, too, the weather had been enchanting, 
and there were Italian sensations to be encountered 
without leaving the banks of the Seine. Day after 
day the air was filled with golden light, and even 
those ehalkish vistas of the Parisian beaux quartiers 
assumed the iridescent tints of autumn. Autumn- 
weather in Europe is often such a very sorry affair 
that a fair-minded American will have it on his 



40 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [n. 

conscience to call attention to a rainless and radiant 
October. 

The echoes of the electoral strife kept me com- 
pany for a while after starting upon that abbre- 
viated journey to Turin, which, as you leave Paris 
at night, in a train- unprovided with encouragements 
to slumber, is a singular mixture of the odious and 
the charming. The charming, however, I think, pre- 
vails ; for the dark half of the journey is, in fact, 
the least interesting. The morning light ushers 
you into the romantic gorges of the Jura, and after 
a big bowl of ca/4 au lait at Culoz you may com- 
pose yourself comfortably for the climax of your 
spectacle. The day before leaving Paris I met a 
French friend who had just returned from a visit to 
a Tuscan country-seat, where he had been watch- 
ing the vintage. " Italy," he said, " is more lovely 
than words can tell, and Prance, steeped in this elec- 
toral turmoil, seems no better than a bear-garden." 
That part of the bear-garden through which you 
travel as you approach the Mont-Cenis seemed to 
me that day very beautiful. The autumn colouring, 
thanks to the absence of rain, had been vivid and 
crisp, and the vines that swung their low garlands 
between the mulberries, in the neighbourhood of 
Chamb^ry, looked like long festoons of coral and 
amber. The frontier- station of Modane, on the 
farther side of the Mont-Cenis tunnel, is a very 
ill-regulated place ; but even the most irritable of 
tourists, meeting it on his way southward, will be 
disposed to consider it good-naturedly. There is far 
too much bustling and scrambling, and the facilities 
afforded you for the obligatory process of ripping 



II.] ITALY EEVISITED. 41 

open your luggage before the officers of the Italian 
custom -house are much scantier than should be; 
but, for myself, there is something that deprecates 
irritation in the shabby green and gray uniforms of 
all the Italian officials who stand loafing about and 
watching the northern invaders scramble back into 
marching order. Wearing an administrative uniform 
does not necessarily spoil a man's temper, as in 
France one is sometimes led to believe ; for these 
excellent under-paid Italians carry theirs as lightly 
as possible, and their answers to your inquiries do 
not in the least bristle with rapiers, buttons, and 
cockades. After leaving Modane you slide straight 
downhill into the Italy of your desire ; and there is 
something very impressive in the way the road edges 
along those great precipices which stand shoulder 
to shoulder, in a long perpendicular file, until they 
finally admit you to a distant glimpse of the ancient 
capital of Piedmont. 

Turin is not a city to make, in vulgar parlance, 
a fuss about, and I pay an extravagant tribute to 
subjective emotion in speaking of it as ancient. 
But if the place is not so peninsular as Florence 
and Eome, at least it is more so than New York 
and Paris ; and while the traveller walks about 
the great arcades and looks at the fourth -rate 
shop windows, he does not scruple to cultivate a 
shameless optimism. Eelatively speaking, Turin is 
diverting ; but there is, after all, no reason in a 
large collection of shabbily-stuccoed houses, disposed 
in a rigidly rectangular manner, for passing a day of 
deep, still gaiety. The only reason, I am afraid, is 
the old superstition of Italy — that property in the 



42 POKTRAITS OF PLACES. [il. 

very look of the written word, the evocation of a 
myriad images, that makes any lover of the arts 
take Italian satisfactions npon easier terms than 
any other. Italy is an idea to conjure with, and 
we play tricks upon our credulity even with such 
inferior apparatus as is offered to our hand at Turin. 
I walked about all the morning under the tall porti- 
coes, thinking it sufficient entertainment to take 
note of the soft, warm air, of that colouring of 
things in Italy that is at once broken and har- 
monious, and of the comings and goings, the physi- 
ognomy and manners, of the excellent Turinese. I 
had opened the old book again ; the old charm was 
in the style ; I was in a more delightful world. I 
saw nothing surpassingly beautiful or curious ; but 
the appreciative traveller finds a vividness in name- 
less details. And I must add that on the threshold 
of Italy he tastes of one solid and perfectly defin- 
able pleasure, in finding himself among the traditions 
of the grand style in architecture. It must be said 
that we have still to come to Italy to see great 
houses. (I am speaking more particularly of town- 
architecture.) In northern cities there are beautiful 
houses, picturesque and curious houses ; sculptured 
gables that hang over the street, charming bay-win- 
dows, hooded doorways, elegant proportions, and a 
profusion of delicate ornament ; but a good specimen 
of an old Italian palazzo has a nobleness that is all 
its own. We laugh at Italian "palaces," at their 
peering paint, their nudity, their dreariness ; but 
they have the great palatial quality — elevation and 
extent. They make smaller houses seem beggarly ; 
they round their great arches and interspace their 



II.] ITALY EE VISITED. 43 

huge windows with a noble indifference to the cost 
of materials. These grand proportions — the colossal 
basements, the doorways that seem meant for cathe- 
drals, the far-away cornices — impart by contrast a 
humble and bourgeois expression to those less exalted 
dwellings in which the air of grandeur depends 
largely upon the help of the upholsterer. At Turin 
my first feeling was really one of shame for the 
architectural manners of our northern lands. I 
have heard people who know the Italians well say 
that at bottom they despise all the rest of mankind 
and regard them as barbarians. I doubt of it, for 
the Italians strike me as having less national vanity 
than any other people in Europe ; but if the charge 
had its truth there would be some ground for the 
feeling in the fact that they live in palaces. 

An impression which, on coming back to Italy, I 
find even stronger than when it was first received 
is that of the contrast between the fecundity of the 
great artistic period and the vulgarity of the Italian 
genius of to-day. The first few hours spent on 
Italian soil are sufficient to renew it, and the pheno- 
menon that I allude to is surely one of the most 
singular in human history. That the people who 
but three hundred years ago had the best taste in 
the world should now have the worst ; that having 
produced the noblest, loveliest, costliest works, they 
should now be given up to the manufacture of 
objects at once ugly and paltry; that the race of 
which Michael Angelo and Eaphael, Leonardo and 
Titian were characteristic should have no other title 
to distinction than third-rate genre pictures and 
catchpenny statues — all this is a frequent per- 



44: POKTKAITS OF PLACES. [il. 

plexity to the observer of actual Italian life. The 
flower of art in these latter years has ceased to 
bloom very powerfully anywhere ; but nowhere 
does it seem so drooping and withered as in the 
shadow of the immortal embodiments of the old 
Italian genius. You go into a church or a gallery 
and feast your fancy upon a splendid picture or an 
exquisite piece of sculpture, and on issuing from the 
door that has admitted you to the beautiful past 
you are confronted with something that has all 
the effect of a very bad joke. The aspect of your 
lodging (the carpets, the curtains, the upholstery in 
general, with their crude and violent colouring and 
their vulgar material), the third-rate look of the 
shops, the extreme bad taste of the dress of the 
women, the cheapness and baseness of every attempt 
at decoration in the cafe's and railway stations, the 
hopeless frivolity of everything that pretends to be 
a work of art — all this modern crudity runs riot 
over the relics of the great period. 

We can do a thing for the first time but once ; 
\t is but once for all that we can have a pleasure 
m its freshness. This is a law which is not on 
the whole, I think, to be regretted, for we sometimes 
learn to know things better by not enjoying them 
too much. It is certain, however, at the same time, 
that a traveller who has worked off the primal fer- 
mentation of his relish for this inexhaustibly inter- 
esting country has by no means entirely drained 
the cup. After thinking of Italy as historical and 
artistic, it will do him no great harm to think of 
her, for a while, as modern, an idea supposed (as a 
general thing correctly) to be fatally at variance 



II.] ITALY REVISITED. 45 

with the Byronic, the Euskinian, the artistic, poetic, 
aesthetic manner of considering this fascinating pen- 
insula. He may grant — I don't say it is absolutely 
necessary — that modern Italy is ugly, prosaic, pro- 
vokingly out of relation to the diary and the album ; 
it is nevertheless true that, at the point things have 
come to, modern Italy in a manner imposes herself. 
I had not been many hours in the country before I 
became conscious of this circumstance ; and I may 
add that, the first irritation past, I found myself 
able to accept it. And if we think of it, nothing is 
more easy to understand than a certain displeasure 
on the part of the young Italy of to-day at being 
looked at by all the world as a kind of soluble 
pigment. Young Italy, preoccupied with its econo- 
mical and political future, ,must be heartily tired 
of being admired for its eyelashes and its pose. 
In one of Thackeray's novels there is mention of 
a young artist who sent to the Eoyal Academy a 
picture representing "A Contadino dancing with a 
Trasteverina at the door of a Locanda, to the music 
of a Pifferaro." It is in this attitude and with 
these conventional accessories that the world has 
hitherto seen fit to represent young Italy, and I do 
not wonder that, if the youth has any spirit, he 
should at last begin to resent our insufferable 
aesthetic patronage. He has established a line of 
tram-cars in Eome, from the Porta del Popolo to the 
Ponte Molle, and it is on one of these democratic 
vehicles that I seem to see him taking his trium- 
phant course down the vista of the future. I will 
not pretend to rejoice with him any more than I 
*eally do ; I will not pretend, as the sentimental 



46 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. In. 

tourists say about it all, as if it were the setting 
of an intaglio or the border of a Eoman scarf, to 
" like " it. Like it or not, as we may, it is evidently 
destined to be ; I see a new Italy in the future 
which in many important respects will equal, if not 
surpass, the most enterprising sections of our native 
land. Perhaps by that time Chicago and San Fran- 
cisco will have acquired a pose, and their sons and 
daughters will dance at the doors of locande. How- 
ever this may be, a vivid impression of an accom- 
plished schism between the old Italy and the new 
is, as the French say, le plus clair of a new visit 
to this ever-suggestive part of the world. The old 
Italy has become more and more of a museum, 
preserved and perpetuated in the midst of the new, 
but without any further relation to it — it must be 
admitted, indeed, that such a relation is consider- 
able — than that of the stock on his shelves to the 
shopkeeper, or of the Siren of the South to the 
showman who stands before his booth. More than 
once, as we move about nowadays in the Italian 
cities, there seems to pass before our eyes a vision 
of the coming years. It represents to our satis- 
faction an Italy united and prosperous, but alto- 
gether commercial. The Italy, indeed, that we 
sentimentalise and romance about was an ardently 
mercantile country ; though I suppose it loved not 
its ledgers less, but its frescoes and altar-pieces 
more. Scattered through this brilliantly economical 
community — this country of a thousand ports — we 
see a large number of beautiful buildings, in which 
an endless series of dusky pictures are darkening, 
dampening, fading, failing, through the years. At 



II.] ITALY KEVISITED. 47 

the doors of the beautiful buildings are little turn- 
stiles, at which there sit a great many men in 
uniform, to whom the visitor pays a ten-penny fee. 
Inside, in the vaulted and frescoed chambers, the 
art of Italy lies buried, as in a thousand mauso- 
leums. It is well taken care of; it is constantly 
copied ; sometimes it is " restored " — as in the case 
of that beautiful boy-figure of Andrea del Sarto, at 
Florence, which may be seen at the gallery of the 
Uffizi, with its honourable duskiness quite peeled 
off and heaven knows what raw, bleeding cuticle 
laid bare. One evening lately, in Florence, in the 
soft twilight, I took a stroll among those encircling 
hills on which the massive villas are mingled with 
the vaporous olives. Presently I arrived where three 
roads met at a wayside shrine, in which, before 
some pious daub of an old-time Madonna, a little 
votive lamp glimmered through the evening air. 
The hour, the lovely evening, the place, the twink- 
ling taper, the sentiment of the observer, the thought 
that some one had been rescued here from an 
assassin, or from some other peril, and had set up a 
little grateful altar in consequence, in the yellow- 
plastered wall of a tangled podere ; all this led me 
to approach the shrine with a reverent, an emotional 
step. I drew near it, but after a few steps I paused. 
I became conscious of an incongruous odour; it 
seemed to me that the evening air was charged 
with a perfume which, although to a certain extent 
familiar, had not hitherto associated itself with 
rustic frescoes and wayside altars. I gently interro- 
gated the atmosphere, and the operation left me no 
doubts. The odour was that of petroleum; the 



48 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [n. 

votive taper was nourished with the national fluid 
of Pennsylvania. I confess that I burst out laugh- 
ing, and a picturesque contadino, wending his home- 
ward way in the dusk, stared at me as if I were an 
iconoclast. If he noticed the petroleum, it was only, 
I imagine, to sniff it gratefully ; but to me the thing 
served as a symbol of the Italy of the future. There 
is a horse -car from the Porta del Popolo to the 
Ponte Molle, and the Tuscan shrines are fed with 
kerosene. 

II. 

If it is very well to come to Turin first, it is 
still better to go to Genoa afterwards. Genoa is 
the queerest place in the world, and even a second 
visit helps you little to straighten it out. In the 
wonderful crooked, twisting, climbing, soaring, bur- 
rowing Genoese alleys the traveller is really up to 
his neck in the old Italian sketchability. Genoa is, i 
I believe, a port of great capacity, and the bequest , 
of the late Duke of Galliera, who left four millions 
of dollars for the purpose of improving and enlarging 
it, will doubtless do much toward converting it into 
one of the great commercial stations of Europe. But 
as, after leaving my hotel the afternoon I arrived, 
I wandered for a long time at hazard through the 
tortuous byways of the city, I said to myself, not 
without an accent of private triumph, that here 
was something it would be almost impossible to 
modernise. I had found my hotel, in the first 
place, extremely entertaining — the Croce di Malta, 
as it was called, established in a gigantic palace 
on the edge of the swarming and not over-clean 



II.] ITALY REVISITED. 49 

harbour. It was the biggest house I had ever 
entered, and the basement alone would have con- 
tained a dozen American caravansaries. I met an 
American gentleman in the vestibule who (as he 
had indeed a perfect right to be) was annoyed by 
its troublesome dimensions — one was a quarter of 
an hour ascending out of the basement — and desired 
to know whether it was a " fair sample " of the 
Genoese inns. It appeared to be an excellent 
specimen of Genoese architecture generally; so far 
as I observed, there were few houses perceptibly 
smaller than this Titanic tavern. I lunched in a 
dusky ballroom, whose ceiling was vaulted, frescoed 
and gilded with the fatal facility of a couple of 
centuries ago, and which looked out upon another 
ancient house -front, equally huge and equally 
battered, from which it was separated only by a 
little wedge of dusky space (one of the principal 
streets, I believe, of Genoa), out of the bottom of 
which the Genoese populace sent up to the windows 
—*-I had to crane out very far to see it — a per- 
petual clattering, shuffling, chaffering sound. Issu- 
ing forth, presently, into this crevice of a street, I 
found an abundance of that soft local colour for the 
love of which one revisits Italy. It offered itself, 
indeed, in a variety of tints, some of which were 
not remarkable for their freshness or purity. But 
their combined effect was highly pictorial, and the 
picture was a very rich and various representation 
of southern low-life. Genoa is the crookedest and 
most incoherent of cities ; tossed about on the 
sides and crests of a dozen hills, it is seamed with 
gullies and ravines that bristle with those innumer- 

K 



50 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [n 

able palaces for which we have heard from our 
earliest years that the place is celebrated. These 
great edifices, with their mottled and faded com- 
plexions, lift their big ornamental cornices to a 
tremendous height in the air, where, in a certain 
indescribably forlorn and desolate fashion, over- 
topping each other, they seem to reflect the twinkle 
and glitter of the warm Mediterranean. Down 
about the basements, in the little dim, close alleys, 
the people are for ever moving to and fro, or stand- 
ing in their cavernous doorways and their dusky, 
crowded shops, calling, chattering, laughing, scram- 
bling, living their lives in the conversational Italian 
fashion. For a long time I had not received such 
an impression of the human agglomeration. I 
had not for a long time seen people elbowing each 
other so closely, or swarming so thickly out of 
populous hives. A traveller is very often disposed 
to ask himself whether it has been worth while to 
leave his home — whatever his home may have 
been — only to see new forms of human suffering, 
only to be reminded that toil and privation, hunger 
and sorrow and sordid effort, are the portion of the 
great majority of his fellow-men. To travel is, as 
it were, to go to the play, to attend a spectacle ; 
and there is something heartless in stepping forth 
into the streets of a foreign town to feast upon 
novelty when the novelty consists simply of the 
slightly different costume in which hunger and 
labour present themselves. These reflections were 
forced upon me as I strolled about in those crepus- 
cular, stale -smelling alleys of Genoa; but after a 
time they ceased to bear me company. The reason 



If.] ITALY REVISITED. 51 

of this, I think, is because (at least to foreign eyes) 
the sum of Italian misery is, on the whole, less than 
the sum of the Italian knowledge of life. That 
people should thank you, with a smile of striking 
sweetness, for the gift of twopence is a proof, cer- 
tainly, of an extreme and constant destitution ; but 
(keeping in mind the sweetness) it is also a proof 
of an enviable ability not to be depressed by cir- 
cumstances. I know that this may possibly be 
great nonsense ; that half the time that we are 
admiring the brightness of the Italian smile the 
romantic natives may be, in reality, in a sullen 
frenzy of impatience and pain. Our observation 
in any foreign land is extremely superficial, and 
our remarks are happily not addressed to the in- 
habitants themselves, who would be sure to exclaim 
upon the impudence of the fancy -picture. The 
other day I visited a very picturesque old city upon 
a mountain-top, where, in the course of my wander- 
ings, I arrived at an old disused gate in the ancient 
town- wall. The gate had not been absolutely for- 
feited ; but the recent completion of a modern road 
down the mountain led most vehicles away to 
another egress. The grass-grown pavement, which 
wound into the plain by a hundred graceful twists 
and plunges, was now given up to ragged contadini 
and their donkeys, and to such wayfarers as were 
not alarmed at the disrepair into which it had 
fallen. I stood in the shadow of the tall old gate- 
way admiring the scene, looking to right and left 
at the wonderful walls of the little town, perched 
on the edge of a shaggy precipice ; at the circling 
mountains over against them; at the road dipping 



52 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [il. 

downward among trie chestnuts and olives. There 
was no one within sight but a young man, who was 
slowly trudging upward, with his coat slung over 
his shoulder and his hat upon his ear, like a 
cavalier in an opera. Like an operatic performer, 
too, he was singing as he came ; the spectacle, 
generally, was operatic, and as his vocal flourishes 
reached my ear I said to myself that in Italy 
accident was always picturesque, and that such a 
figure had been exactly what was wanted to set off 
the landscape. It suggested in a high degree that 
knowledge of life for which I just now commended 
the Italians. I was turning back, under the old 
gateway, into the town, when the young man over- 
took me, and, suspending his song, asked me if I 
could favour him with a match to light the hoarded 
remnant of a cigar. This request led, as I walked 
back to the inn, to my having some conversation 
with him. He was a native of the ancient city, 
and answered freely all my inquiries as to its x 
manners and customs and the state of public 
opinion there. But the point of my anecdote is 
that he presently proved to be a brooding young 
radical and communist, filled with hatred of the 
present Italian government, raging with discontent 
and crude political passion, professing a ridiculous 
hope that Italy would soon have, as France had 
had, her "'89," and declaring that he, for his part, 
would willingly lend a hand to chop off the heads 
of the king and the royal family. He was an 
unhappy, underfed, unemployed young man, who 
took a hard, grim view of everything, and was 
operatic only quite in spite of himself. This made 



II.] ITALY REVISITED. 53 

it very absurd of me to have looked at him simply 
as a graceful ornament to the prospect, an har- 
monious little figure in the middle distance. " Damn 
the prospect, damn the middle distance ! " would 
have been all his philosophy. Yet, but for the 
accident of my having a little talk with him, I 
should have made him do service, in memory, as an 
example of sensuous optimism ! 

I am bound to say, however, that I believe that a 
great deal of the sensuous optimism that I noticed in 
the Genoese alleys and beneath the low, crowded 
arcades along the port was very real. Here every 
one was magnificently sunburnt, and there were 
plenty of those queer types, mahogany -coloured, 
bare -chested mariners, with earrings and crimson 
girdles, that make a southern seaport entertaining. 
But it is not fair to speak as if at Genoa there 
were nothing but low-life to be seen, for the place 
is the residence of some of the grandest people in 
the world. Nor are all the palaces ranged upon 
dusky alleys ; the handsomest and most impressive 
form a splendid series on each side of a couple of 
very proper streets, in which there is plenty of room 
for a coach-and-four to approach the big doorways. 
Many of these doorways are open, revealing great 
marble staircases, with couchant lions for balus- 
trades, and ceremonious courts surrounded by walls 
of sun -softened yellow. One of the palaces is 
coloured a goodly red, and contains, in particular, 
the grand people I just now spoke of. They live, 
indeed, in the third story ; but here they have 
suites of wonderful painted and gilded chambers, 
in which there are many foreshortened frescoes in 



54 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [n. 

the vaulted ceilings, and the walls are embossed 
with the most florid mouldings. These distinguished 
tenants bear the name of Vandyke, though they are 
members of the noble family of Brignole-Sale, one 
of whose children (the Duchess of Galliera) has 
lately given proof of nobleness in presenting the 
gallery of the Eed Palace to the city of Genoa. 

III. 

On leaving Genoa I repaired to Spezia, chiefly 
with a view of accomplishing a sentimental pilgrim- 
age, which I, in fact, achieved, in the most agreeable 
conditions. The Gulf of Spezia is now the head- 
quarters of the Italian fleet, and there were several 
big iron-plated frigates riding at anchor in front of 
the town. The streets were filled with lads in blue 
flannel, who were receiving instruction at a school- 
ship in the harbour, and in the evening — there 
was a brilliant moon — the little breakwater which 
stretched out into the Mediterranean offered a pro- 
menade to the naval functionaries. But this fact 
is, from the tourist's point of view, of little account, 
for since it has become prosperous Spezia has grown 
ugly. The place is filled with long, dull stretches 
of dead wall and great raw expanses of artificial 
land. It wears that look of monstrous, of more 
than Occidental, newness which distinguishes all 
the creations of the young Italian state. Nor did 
I find any great compensation in an immense new 
inn, which has lately been deposited by the edge 
of the sea, in anticipation of a passeggiata which is 
to come that way some five years hence, the region 



[I.] ITALY REVISITED. 55 

being in the meantime of the most primitive forma- 
tion. The inn was filled with grave English people, 
who looked respectable and bored, and there was of 
course a Church of England service in the gaudily- 
frescoed parlour. Neither. was it the drive to Porto 
Venere that chiefly pleased me — a drive among vines 
and olives — over the hills and beside the sea, to 
a queer little crumbling village on a headland, as 
sweetly desolate and superannuated as the name it 
bears. There is a ruined church near the village, 
which occupies the site (according to tradition) of 
an ancient temple of Yenus ; and if Yenus ever 
revisits her desecrated shrines she must sometimes 
pause a moment in that sunny stillness, and listen 
to the murmur of the tideless sea at the base of 
the narrow promontory. If Yenus sometimes comes 
there, Apollo surely does as much ; for close to the 
temple is a gateway, surmounted by an inscription 
in Italian and English, which admits you to a curious 
(and it must be confessed rather cockneyfied) cave 
among the rocks. It was here, says the inscription, 
that the great Byron, swimmer and poet, " defied the 
waves of the Ligurian sea." The fact is interesting, 
though not supremely so ; for Byron was always defy- 
ing something, and if a slab had been put up where- 
ever this performance came off, these commemorative 
tablets would be, in many parts of Europe, as thick 
as milestones. No ; the great merit of Spezia, to 
my eye, is that I engaged a boat there of a lovely 
October afternoon, and had myself rowed across 
the gulf — it took about an hour and a half — to the 
little bay of Lerici, which opens out of it. This 
bay of Lerici is charming; the bosky gray -green 



56 POJRTKAITS OF PLACES. [il. 

hills close it in, and on either side of the entiance, 
perched upon a bold headland, a wonderful old 
crumbling castle keeps ineffectual guard. The place 
is classic for all English travellers, for in the middle 
of the curving shore is the now desolate little villa 
in which Shelley spent the last months of his short 
life. He was living at Lerici when he started on that 
short southern cruise from which he never returned. 
The house he occupied is strangely shabby, and 
as sad as you may choose to find it. It stands 
directly upon the beach, with scarred and battered 
walls, and a loggia of several arches opening upon 
a little terrace with a rugged parapet, which, when 
the wind blows, must be drenched with the salt 
spray. The place is very lonely — all overwearied 
with sun and breeze and brine — very close to nature, 
as it was Shelley's passion to be. I can fancy a 
great lyric poet sitting on the terrace, of a warm 
evening, far from England, in the early years of the 
century. In that place, and with his genius, he 
would, as a matter of course, have heard in the voice 
of nature a sweetness which only the lyric movement 
could translate. It is a place where an English- 
speaking traveller may very honestly be sentimental 
and feel moved, himself, to lyric utterance. But I 
must content myself with saying in halting prose 
that I remember few episodes of Italian travel more 
sympathetic, as they have it here, than that perfect 
autumn afternoon; the half-hour's station on the 
little battered terrace of the villa ; the climb to the 
singularly picturesque old castle that hangs above 
Lerici ; the meditative lounge, in the fading light, 
on the vine- decked platform that looked out toward 



H.] ITALY EEVISITED. 57 

the sunset and the darkening mountains, and, far 
below, upon the quiet sea, beyond which the pale- 
faced villa stared up at the brightening moon. 



IV. 

I had never known Florence more charming 
than I found her for a week in that brilliant 
October. She sat in the sunshine beside her yellow 
river like the little treasure-city that she has always 
seemed, without commerce, without other industry 
than the manufacture of mosaic paper-weights and 
alabaster Cupids, without actuality, or energy, or 
earnestness, or any of those rugged virtues which 
in most cases are deemed indispensable for civic 
robustness; with nothing but the little unaug- 
mented stock of her mediaeval memories, her tender- 
coloured mountains, her churches and palaces, pic- 
tures and statues. There were very few strangers ; 
one's detested fellow sight-seer was infrequent ; the 
native population itself seemed scanty ; the sound 
of wheels in the streets was but occasional; by 
eight o'clock at night, apparently, every one had 
gone to bed, and the wandering tourist, still wander- 
ing, had the place to himself — had the thick 
shadow-masses of the great palaces, and the shafts 
of moonlight striking the polygonal paving-stones, 
and the empty bridges, and the silvered yellow of the 
Arno, and the stillness broken only by a homeward 
step, accompanied by a snatch of song from a warm. 
Italian voice. My room at the inn looked out on 
the river, and was flooded all day with sunshine. 
There was an absurd orange-coloured paper on tbe 



58 PORTEAITS OF PLACES. [n. 

walls ; the Arno, of a hue not altogether different, 
flowed beneath ; and on the other side of it rose a 
line of sallow houses, of extreme antiquity, crumb- 
ling and mouldering, bulging and protruding over the 
stream. (I seem to speak of their fronts ; but what 
I saw was their shabby backs, which were exposed 
to the cheerful flicker of the river, while the fronts 
stood for ever in the deep, damp shadow of a narrow 
mediseval street.) All this brightness and yellow- 
ness was a perpetual delight ; it was a part of that 
indefinably charming colour which Florence always 
seems to wear as you look up and down at it from 
the river, from the bridges and quays. This is 
a kind of grave brilliancy — a harmony of high tints 
— which I know not how to describe. There are 
yellow walls and green blinds and red roofs, and 
intervals of brilliant brown and natural -looking 
blue : but the picture is not spotty nor gaudy, 
thanks to the colours being distributed in large and 
comfortable masses, and to its being washed over, 
as it were, by some happy softness of sunshine. 
The river-front of Florence is, in short, a delightful 
composition. Part of its charm comes, of course, 
from the generous aspect of those high-based Tuscan 
palaces which a renewal of acquaintance with them 
has again commended to me as the most dignified 
dwellings in the world. Nothing can be finer than 
that look of giving up the whole immense ground- 
floor to simple purposes of vestibule and staircase, 
of court and high-arched entrance ; as if this were 
all but a massive pedestal for the real habitation, 
and people were not properly housed unless, to 
begin with, they should be lifted fifty feet above the 



n.] ITALY REVISITED. 59 

pavement. The great blocks of the basement ; the 
great intervals, horizontally and vertically, from 
window to window (telling of the height and breadth 
of the rooms within) ; the armorial shield hung for- 
ward at one of the angles ; the wide-brimmed roof, 
overshadowing the narrow street ; the rich old 
browns and yellows- of the walls — these definite 
elements are put together with admirable art. 

Take one of these noble structures out of its 
oblique situation in the town ; call it no longer a 
palace, but a villa; set it down upon a terrace, on 
one of the hills that encircle Florence, with a row 
of high-waisted cypresses beside it, a grassy court- 
yard, and a view of the Florentine towers and the 
^valley of the Arno, and you will think it perhaps 
even more worthy of your esteem. It was a Sunday 
noon, and brilliantly warm, when I arrived in Flor- 
ence ; and after I had looked from my windows 
a while at that quietly-basking river-front I have 
spoken of, I took my way across one of the bridges 
and then out of one of the gates — that immensely 
tall Eoman Gate, in which the space from the top 
of the arch to the cornice (except that there is 
scarcely a cornice, it is all a plain, massive piece of 
wall) is as great (or seems to be) as that from the 
ground to the former point. Then I climbed a 
steep and winding way — much of it a little dull, 
if one likes, being bounded by mottled, mossy 
garden-walls — to a villa on a hill-top, where I 
found various things that touched me with almost 
too fine a point. Seeing them again, often, for a 
week, both by sunlight and moonshine, I never 
quite learned not to covet them ; not to feel that 



60 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [ir. 

not being a part of them was somehow to miss an 
exquisite chance. What a tranquil, contented life 
it seemed, with romantic beauty as a part of its 
daily texture ! — the sunny terrace, with its tangled 
podere beneath it; the bright gray olives against 
the bright blue sky ; the long, serene, horizontal 
lines of other villas, flanked by their upward 
cypresses, disposed upon the neighbouring hills ; the 
richest little city in the world in a softly-scooped 
hollow at one's feet, and beyond it the most appeal- 
ing of views, the most majestic, yet the most 
familiar. Within the villa was a great love of art 
and a painting-room full of successful work, so that 
if human life there seemed very tranquil, the tran- 
quillity meant simply contentment and devoted 
occupation. A beautiful occupation in that beauti- 
ful position, what could possibly be better ? That 
is what I spoke just now of envying — a way of life 
that is not afraid of a little isolation and tolerably 
quiet days. When such a life presents itself in a, s 
dull or an ugly place, we esteem it, we admire it, 
but we do not feel it to be the ideal of good fortune. 
When, however, the people who lead it move as 
figures in an ancient, noble landscape, and their 
walks and contemplations are like a turning of the 
leaves of history, we seem to have before us an 
admirable case of virtue made easy ; meaning here 
by virtue, contentment and concentration, the love 
of privacy and study. One need not be exacting if 
one lives among local conditions that are of them- 
selres constantly suggestive. It is true, indeed, 
that I might, after a certain time, grow weary of a 
regular afternoon stroll among the Florentine lanes ; 



II.] ITALY EEVISITED. 61 

of sitting on low parapets, in intervals of flower- 
topped wall, and looking across at Fiesole, or down 
the rich-hued valley of the Arno ; of pausing at the 
open gates of villas and wondering at the height of 
cypresses and the depth of loggias ; of walking 
home in the fading light and noting on a dozen 
westward-looking surfaces the glow of the opposite 
sunset. But for a week or so all this was delight- 
ful. The villas are innumerable, and if one is a 
stranger half the talk is about villas. This one has 
a story ; that one has another ; they all look as if 
they had stories. Most of them are offered to rent 
(many of them for sale) at prices unnaturally low; 
you may have a tower and a garden, a chapel and 
an expanse of thirty windows, for five hundred 
dollars a year. In imagination, you hire three or 
four ; you take possession, and settle^ and live there. 
About the finest there is something very grave and 
stately; about two or three of the best there is 
something even solemn and tragic. From what 
does this latter impression come ? You gather it 
it as you stand there in the early dusk, looking at 
the long, pale-brown facade, the enormous windows, 
the iron cages fastened upon the lower ones. Part 
of the brooding expression of these great houses 
comes, even when they have not fallen into decay, 
from their look of having outlived their original 
use. Their extraordinary largeness and massiveness 
are a satire upon their present fate. They were not 
built with such a thickness of wall and depth of 
embrasure, such a solidity of staircase and super- 
fluity of stone, simply to afford an economical 
winter residence to English and American families. 



62 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [il. 

I know not whether it was the appearance of these 
stony old villas, which seemed so dumbly conscious 
of a change of manners, that threw a tinge of 
melancholy over the general prospect; certain it is 
that, having always found this plaintive note in the 
view of Florence, it seemed to me now particularly 
distinct. " Lovely, lovely, but it makes me blue," 
the fanciful stranger could not but murmur to him- 
self as, in the late afternoon, he looked at the land- 
scape from over one of the low parapets, and then, 
with his hands in his pockets, turned away indoors 
to candles and dinner. 



Y. 

Below, in the city, in wandering about in the 
streets and churches and museums, it was impossible 
not to have a good deal of the same feeling ; but 
here the impression was more easy to analyse. It 
came from a sense of the perfect separateness of all 
the great productions of the Eenaissance from the 
present and the future of the place, from the actual 
life and manners, the native ideal. I have already 
spoken of the way in which the great aggregation 
of beautiful works of art in the Italian cities strikes 
the visitor nowadays (so far as present Italy is con- 
cerned) as the mere stock-in-trade of an impecuni- 
ous but thrifty people. It is this metaphysical 
desertedness and loneliness of the great works of 
architecture and sculpture that deposits a certain 
weight upon the heart; when we see a great tradi- 
tion broken we feel something of the pain with 
which we hear a stifled cry. But regret is one 



it] ITALY REVISITED. 63 

thing and resentment is another. Seeing one morn- 
ing, in a shop-window, the series of Mornings in 
Florence, published a few years since by Mr. Buskin, 
I made haste to enter and purchase these amusing 
little books, some passages of which I remembered 
formerly to have read. I could not turn over many 
pages without observing that the " separateness " 
of the new and old which I just mentioned had 
produced in their author the liveliest irritation. 
"With the more acute phases of this sentiment it 
was difficult to sympathise, for the simple reason, it 
seems to me, that it savours of arrogance to demand 
of any people, as a right of one's own, that they 
shall be artistic. " Be artistic yourselves ! " is the 
very natural reply that young Italy has at hand for 
English critics and censors. When a people pro- 
duces beautiful statues and pictures it gives us some- 
thing more than is set down in the bond, and we 
must thank it for its generosity ; and when it stops 
producing them or caring for them we may cease 
thanking, but we hardly have a right to begin and 
abuse it. The wreck of Florence, says Mr. Euskin, 
" is now too ghastly and heart-breaking to any human 
soul that remembers the days of old ; " and these 
desperate words are an allusion to the fact that the 
little square in front of the cathedral, at the foot of 
Giotto's Tower, with the grand Baptistery on the 
other side, is now the resort of a number of hackney- 
coaches and omnibuses. This fact is doubtless 
lamentable, and it would be a hundred times more 
agreeable to see among people who have been made 
the heirs of so priceless a work of art as the sublime 
campanile some such feeling about it as would keep 



G4 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [n. 

it free even from the danger of defilement. A cab- 
stand is a very ugly and dirty thing, and Giotto's 
Tower should have nothing in common with such 
conveniences. But there is more than one way of 
taking such things, and a quiet traveller, who has 
been walking about for a week with his mind full 
of the sweetness and suggestiveness of a hundred 
Florentine places, may feel at last, in looking into 
Mr. Buskin's little tracts that, discord for discord, 
there is not much to choose between the importunity 
of the author's personal ill-humour and the incon- 
gruity of horse-pails and bundles of hay. And one 
may say this without being at all a partisan of the 
doctrine of the inevitableness of new desecrations. 
For my own part, I believe there are few things in 
this line that the new Italian spirit is not capable of, 
and not many, indeed, that we are not destined to 
see. Bictures and buildings will not be completely 
destroyed, because in that case foreigners with full 
pockets would cease to visit the country, and the^ 
turn-stiles at the doors of the old palaces and con- 
vents, with the little patented slit for absorbing 
your half-franc, would grow quite rusty, and creak 
with disuse. But it is safe to say that the new 
Italy, growing into an old Italy again, will continue 
to take her elbow-room wherever she finds it. 

I am almost ashamed to say what I did with 
Mr. Buskin's little books. I put them into my 
pocket and betook myself to Santa Maria Novella. 
There I sat down, and after I had looked about for 
a while at the beautiful church, I drew them forth 
one by one, and read the greater part of them. 
Occupying one's self with light literature in a great 



n.] ITALY REVISITED. 65 

religious edifice is perhaps as bad a piece of profana- 
tion as any of those rude dealings which Mr. Buskin 
justly deplores ; but a traveller has to make the 
most of odd moments, and I was waiting for a friend 
in whose company I was to go and look at Giotto's 
beautiful frescoes in the cloister of the church. My 
friend was a long time coming, so that I had an 
hour with Mr. Buskin, whom I called just now a 
light litterateur, because in these little Mornings in 
Florence he is for ever making his readers laugh. 
I remembered, of course, where I was ; and, in spite 
of my latent hilarity, I felt that I had rarely got 
such a snubbing. I had really been enjoying the 
good old city of Florence ; but I now learned from 
Mr. Buskin that this was a scandalous waste of 
charity. I should have gone about with an impre- 
cation on my lips, I should have worn a face three 
yards long. I had taken great pleasure in certain 
frescoes by Ghirlandaio, in the choir of that very 
church ; but it appeared from one of the little books 
that these frescoes were as naught. I had much 
admired Santa Croce, and I had thought the Duomo 
a very noble affair ; but I had now the most positive 
assurance I knew nothing about it. After a while, 
if it was only ill-humour that was needed for doing 
honour to the city of the Medici, I felt that I had 
risen to a proper level ; only now it was Mr. Buskin 
himself I had lost patience with, and not the stupid 
Brunelleschi and the vulgar Ghirlandaio. Indeed, I 
lost patience altogether, and asked myself by what 
right this informal votary of form pretended to run 
riot through a quiet traveller's relish for the noblest 
of pleasures — his wholesome enjoyment of the love- 

F 



66 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [n. 

liest of cities. The little books seemed invidious 

and insane, and it was only when I remembered 

that I had been under no obligation to buy them 

that I checked myself in repenting of having done 

so. Then, at last, my friend arrived, and we passed 

together out of the church, and through the first 

cloister beside it, into a smaller enclosure, where we 

stood a while to look at the tomb of the Marchesa 

Strozzi-Eidolfi, upon which the great Giotto has 

painted four superb little pictures. It was easy to 

see the pictures were superb ; but I drew forth one 

of my little books again, for I had observed that 

Mr. Euskin spoke of them. Hereupon I recovered 

my tolerance ; for what could be better in this case, 

I asked myself, than Mr. Euskin's remarks ? They 

are, in fact, excellent and charming, and full of 

appreciation of the deep and simple beauty of the 

great painter's work. I read them aloud to my 

companion ; but my companion was rather, as the 

phrase is, "put off" by them. One of the frescoes 

(it is a picture of the birth of the Virgin) contains 

a figure coming through a door. " Of ornament," I 

quote, " there is only the entirely simple outline of 

the vase which the servant carries ; of colour two or 

three masses of sober red and pure white, with brown 

and gray. That is all," Mr. Euskin continues. 

"And if you are pleased with this you can see 

Florence. But if not, by all means amuse yourself 

there, if you find it amusing, as long as you like ; 

you can never see it." You can never see it. This 

seemed to my friend insufferable, and I had to 

shuffle away the book again, so that we might look 

at the fresco with the unruffled geniality it deserves. 



II.] ITALY REVISITED. 67 

We agreed afterwards, when in a more convenient 
place I read aloud a good many more passages from 
Mr. Buskin's tracts, that there are a great many 
ways of seeing Florence, as there are of seeing most 
beautiful and interesting things, and that it is very 
dry and pedantic to say that the happy vision de- 
pends upon our squaring our toes with a certain 
particular chalk -mark. We see Florence wherever 
and whenever we enjoy it, and for enjoying it we 
find a great many more pretexts than Mr. Buskin 
seems inclined to allow. My friend and I agreed 
also, however, that the little books were an excellent 
purchase, on account of the great charm and felicity 
of much of their incidental criticism ; to say nothing, 
as I hinted just now, of their being extremely amus- 
ing. Nothing, in fact, is more comical than the 
familiar asperity of the author's style and the peda- 
gogic fashion in which he pushes and pulls his 
unhappy pupils about, jerking their heads toward 
this, rapping their knuckles for that, sending them 
to stand in corners, and giving them Scripture texts 
to copy. But it is neither the felicities nor the 
aberrations of detail, in Mr. Buskin's writings, that 
are the main affair for most readers ; it is the gene- 
ral tone that, as I have said, puts them off or draws 
them on. For many persons he will never bear the 
test of being read in this rich old Italy, where art, 
so long as it really lived at all, was spontaneous, 
joyous, irresponsible. If the reader is in daily con- 
tact with those beautiful Florentine works which do 
still, in a way, force themselves into notice through 
the vulgarity and cruelty of modern profanation, it 
will seem to him that Mr. Buskin's little books are 



68 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [n. 

pitched in the strangest falsetto key. " One may 
read a hundred pages of this sort of thing," said my 
friend, " without ever dreaming that he is talking 
about art. You can say nothing worse about it 
than that." And that is very true. Art is the one 
corner of human life in which we may take our 
ease. To justify our presence there the only thing 
that is demanded of us is that we shall have a 
passion for representation. In other places our 
passions are conditioned and embarrassed ; we are 
allowed to have only so many as are consistent with 
those of our neighbours ; with their convenience and 
well-being, with their convictions and prejudices, 
their rules and regulations. Art means an escape 
from all this. Wherever her brilliant standard floats 
the need for apologies and exonerations is over; 
there it is enough simply that we please or that we 
are pleased. There the tree is judged only by its 
fruits. If these are sweet, one is welcome to pluck 
them. 

One may read a great many pages of Mr. Euskin 
without getting a hint of this delightful truth; a 
hint of the not unimportant fact that art, after all, is 
made for us, and not we for art. This idea of the 
value of a work of art being the amount of illusion 
it yields is conspicuous by its absence. And as for 
Mr. Buskin's world of art being a place where we 
may take life easily, woe to the luckless mortal who 
enters it with any such disposition. Instead of a 
garden of delight, he finds a sort of assize- court, in 
perpetual session. Instead of a place in which 
human responsibilities are lightened and suspended, 
he finds a region governed by a kind of Draconic 



II.] ITALY EEVISITED. 69 

legislation. His responsibilities, indeed, are tenfold 
increased ; tlie gulf between truth and error is for 
ever yawning at his feet ; the pains and penalties 
of this same error are advertised, in apocalyptic ter- 
minology, upon a thousand sign-posts ; and the poor 
wanderer soon begins to look back with infinite 
longing to the lost paradise of the artless. There 
can be no greater want of tact in dealing with those 
things with which men attempt to ornament life 
than to be perpetually talking about " error." A 
truce to all rigidities is the law of the place ; the 
only thing that is absolute there is sensible charm. 
The grim old bearer of the scales excuses herself ; she 
feels that this is not her province. Differences here 
are not iniquity and righteousness ; they are simply 
variations of temperament and of point of view. We 
are not under theological government. 



VI. 

It was very charming, in the bright, warm days, 
to wander from one corner of Florence to another, 
paying one's respects again to remembered master- 
pieces. It was pleasant also to find that memory 
had played no tricks, and that the beautiful things 
of an earlier year were as beautiful as ever. To 
enumerate these beautiful things would take a great 
deal of space ; for I never had been more struck with 
the mere quantity of brilliant Florentine work. Even 
giving up the Duomo and Santa Croce to Mr. Euskin 
as very ill-arranged edifices, the list of the Florentine 
treasures is almost inexhaustible. Those long outer 
galleries of the Uffizi had never seemed to me more 



70 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [iL 

delectable ; sometimes there were not more than two 
or three figures standing there, Baedeker in hand, to 
break the charming perspective. One side of this 
upstairs-portico, it will be remembered, is entirely 
composed of glass ; a continuity of old-fashioned 
windows, draped with white curtains of rather primi- 
tive fashion, which hang there till they acquire 
a perceptible "tone." The light, passing through 
them, is softly filtered and diffused ; it rests mildly 
upon the old marbles — chiefly antique Eoman busts 
— which stand in the narrow intervals of the case- 
ments. It is projected upon the numerous pictures 
that cover the opposite wall, and that are not by 
any means, as a general thing, the gems of the great 
collection ; it imparts a faded brightness to the old 
ornamental arabesques upon the painted wooden 
ceiling, and it makes a great soft shining upon the 
marble floor, in which, as you look up and down, you 
see the strolling tourists and the motionless copyists 
almost reflected. I don't know why I should find 
all this very pleasant, but, in fact, I have seldom 
gone into the Uffizi without walking the length of 
this third-story cloister, between the (for the most 
part) third-rate pictures and the faded cotton cur- 
tains. Why is it that in Italy we see a charm in 
things in regard to which in other countries we 
always take vulgarity for granted ? If in the city 
of New York a great museum of the arts were to be 
provided, by way of decoration, with a species of 
verandah inclosed on one side by a series of small- 
paned windows, draped in dirty linen, and furnished 
on the other with an array of pictorial feebleness, 
the place being surmounted by a thinly -painted 



II.] ITALY REVISITED. 71 

wooden roof, strongly suggestive of summer heat, of 
winter cold, of frequent leakage, those amateurs who 
had had the advantage of foreign travel would be at 
small pains to conceal their contempt. Contemptible 
or respectable, to the judicial mind, this quaint old 
loggia of the Uffizi admitted me into twenty cham- 
bers where I found as great a number of ancient 
favourites. I do not know that I had a warmer 
greeting for any old friend than for Andrea del Sarto, 
that most touching of painters who is not one of the 
first. But it was on the other side of the Arno that 
I found him in force, in those dusky drawing-rooms 
of the Pitti Palace, to which you take your way 
along the tortuous tunnel that wanders through the 
houses of Florence, and is supported by the little 
goldsmiths' booths on the Ponte Vecchio. In the 
rich, insufficient light of these beautiful rooms, where, 
to look at the pictures, you sit in damask chairs and 
rest your elbows on tables of malachite, Andrea del 
Sarto becomes peculiarly effective. Before long you 
feel a real affection for him. But the great pleasure, 
after all, was to revisit the earlier masters, in those 
specimens of them chiefly that bloom so unfadingly 
on the big, plain walls of the Academy. Era Angelico 
and Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, and Lorenzo di Credi 
are the sweetest and best of all painters ; as I sat 
for an hour in their company, in the cold great hall 
of the institution I have mentioned — there are 
shabby rafters above and an immense expanse of 
brick tiles below, and many bad pictures as well as 
good ones — it seemed to me more than ever that if 
one really had to choose one could not do better 
than choose here. You may sit very quietly and 



72 PORTKAITS OF PLACES. [a. 

comfortably at the Academy, in this big first room — 
at the upper end, especially, on the left — because 
more than many other places it savours of old Flor- 
ence. More for instance, in reality, than the Bar- 
gello, though the Bargello makes great pretensions. 
Beautiful and picturesque as the Bargello is, it smells 
too strongly of restoration, and, much of old Italy as 
still lurks in its furbished and renovated chambers, 
it speaks even more distinctly of the ill-mannered 
young kingdom that has (as unavoidably as you 
please) lifted down a hundred delicate works of 
sculpture from the convent-walls where their pious 
authors placed them. If the early Tuscan painters 
are exquisite, I can think of no praise generous 
enough for the sculptors of the same period, Dona- 
tello and Luca della Robbia, Matteo Civitale and 
Mino da Fiesole, who, as I refreshed my memory of 
them, seemed to me to leave absolutely nothing to 
be desired in the way of purity of inspiration and 
grace of invention. The Bargello is full of early 
Tuscan sculpture, most of the pieces of which have 
come from suppressed convents ; and even if the 
visitor be an ardent liberal, he is uncomfortably 
conscious of the rather brutal process by which it 
has been collected. One can hardly envy young 
Italy the number of disagreeable things she has had 
to do. 

The railway journey from Florence to Eome has 
been altered both for the better and for the worse ; 
for the better, in that it has been shortened by a 
couple of hours ; for the worse, inasmuch as, when 
about half the distance has been traversed, the train 
deflects to the west, and leaves the beautiful old 



II.] ITALY REVISITED. 73 

cities of Assisi, Perugia, Terni, Narni, unvisited. Of 
old, it was possible to visit these places, in a manner, 
from the window of the train ; even if yon did not 
stop, as you probably could not, every time you 
passed, the picturesque fashion in which, like a 
loosened belt on an aged and shrunken person, their 
old red walls held them easily together was some- 
thing well worth noting. Now, however, by way of 
compensation, the express-train to Eome stops at 
Orvieto, and in consequence ... In consequence 
what ? What is the consequence of an express train 
stopping at Orvieto ? As I glibly wrote that sen- 
tence I suddenly paused, with a sense of the queer 
stuff I was uttering. That an express train would 
graze the base of the horrid purple mountain from 
the apex of which this dark old Catholic city uplifts 
the glittering front of its cathedral — that might have 
been foretold by a keen observer of contemporary 
manners. But that it would really have the gross- 
ness to stop there, this is a fact over which, as he 
records it, a sentimental chronicler may well make 
what is vulgarly called an ado. The train does stop 
at Orvieto, not very long, it is true, but long enough 
to let you out. The same phenomenon takes place 
on the following day, when, having visited the city, 
you get in again. I availed myself of both of these 
occasions, having formerly neglected to drive to 
Orvieto in a post-chaise. And really, the railway- 
station being in the plain, and the town on the sum- 
mit of an extraordinary hill, you have time to forget 
all about the triumphs of steam, while you wind 
upwards to the city-gate. The position of Orvieto 
is superb ; it is worthy of the " middle distance " of 



74 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [it 

a last-century landscape. But, as every one knows, 
the beautiful cathedral is the proper attraction of the 
place, which, indeed, save for this fine monument, 
and for its craggy and crumbling ramparts, is a 
meanly arranged and, as Italian cities go, not par- 
ticularly impressive little town. I spent a beautiful 
Sunday there, and I looked at the charming church. 
I looked at it a great deal — a great deal considering 
that on the whole I found it inferior to its fame. 
Intensely brilliant, however, is the densely carved 
front ; densely covered with the freshest -looking 
mosaics. The old white marble of the sculptured 
portions is as softly yellow as ancient ivory; the 
large, exceedingly bright pictures above them flashed 
and twinkled in the splendid weather. Very beauti- 
ful and interesting are the theological frescoes of Luca 
Signorelli, though I have seen pictures that struck 
me as more attaching. Very enchanting, finally, 
are the clear-faced saints and seraphs, in robes of 
pink and azure, whom Fra Angelico has painted upon 
the ceiling of the great chapel, along with a noble 
sitting figure — more expressive of movement than 
most of the creations of this pictorial peace-maker — 
of Christ in judgment. But the interest of the 
cathedral of Orvieto is mainly not the visible result, 
but the historical process that lies behind it ; those 
three hundred years of devoted popular labour of 
which an American scholar has written an admirable 
account. 1 

1 Charles Eliot Norton : Study and Travel in Italy 



III. 

OCCASIONAL PARIS. 

1877. 

It is hard to say exactly what is the profit of com- 
paring one race with another, and weighing in opposed 
groups the manners and customs of neighbouring 
countries ; but it is certain that as we move about the 
world we constantly indulge in this exercise. This is 
especially the case if we happen to be infected with 
the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite — that uncom- 
fortable consequence of seeing many lands and 
feeling at home in none. To be a cosmopolite is 
not, I think, an ideal ; the ideal should be to be a 
concentrated patriot. Being a cosmopolite is an 
accident, but one must make the best of it. If you 
have lived about, as the phrase is, you have lost 
that sense of the absoluteness and the sanctity of 
the habits of your fellow-patriots which once made 
you so happy in the midst of them. You have 
seen that there are a great many patriae in the 
world, and that each of these is filled with excellent 
people for whom the local idiosyncrasies are the 
only thing that is not rather barbarous. There 
comes a time when one set of customs, wherever it 



76 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [in. 

may be found, grows to seem to you about as pro- 
vincial as another; and then I suppose it may be 
said of you that you have become a cosmopolite. 
You have formed the habit of comparing, of looking 
for points of difference and of resemblance, for pres- 
ent and absent advantages, for the virtues that go 
with certain defects, and the defects that go with 
certain virtues. If this is poor work compared with 
the active practice, in the sphere to which a dis- 
criminating Providence has assigned you, of the 
duties of a tax-payer, an elector, a juryman or a 
diner-out, there is nevertheless something to be said 
for it. It is good to think well of mankind, and 
this, on the whole, a cosmopolite does. If you limit 
your generalisations to the sphere I mentioned just 
now, there is a danger that your occasional fits of 
pessimism may be too sweeping. When you are 
out of humour the whole country suffers, because at 
such moments one is never discriminating, and it 
costs you very little bad logic to lump your fellow- 
citizens together. But if you are living about, as I 
say, certain differences impose themselves. The 
worst you can say of the human race is, for instance, 
that the Germans are a detestable people. They 
do not represent the human race for you, as in your 
native town your fellow-citizens do, and your un- 
flattering judgment has a flattering reverse. If the 
Germans are detestable, you are mentally saying, 
there are those admirable French, or those charming 
Americans, or those interesting English. (Of course 
it is simply by accident that I couple the German 
name here with the unfavourable adjective. The 
epithets may be transposed at will.) Nothing can 



III.] OCCASIONAL PARIS. 77 

well be more different from anything else than the 
English from the French, so that, if you are acquainted 
with both nations, it may be said that on any special 
point your agreeable impression of the one implies 
a censorious attitude toward the other, and vice versd 
This has rather a shocking sound ; it makes the 
cosmopolite appear invidious and narrow-minded. 
But I hasten to add that there seems no real reason 
why even the most delicate conscience should take 
alarm. The consequence of the cosmopolite spirit 
is to initiate you into the merits of all peoples ; to 
convince you that national virtues are numerous, 
though they may be very different, and to make 
downright preference really very hard. I have, for 
instance, every disposition to think better of the 
English race than of any other except my own. 
There are things which make it natural I should ; 
there are inducements, provocations, temptations, 
almost bribes. There have been moments when I 
have almost burned my ships behind me, and de- 
clared that, as it simplified matters greatly to pin 
one's faith to a chosen people, I would henceforth 
cease to trouble my head about the lights and 
shades of the foreign character. I am convinced 
that if I had taken this reckless engagement, I 
should greatly have regretted it. You may find a 
room very comfortable to sit in with the window 
open, and not like it at all when the window has been 
shut. If one were to give up the privilege of com- 
paring the English with other people, one would 
very soon, in a moment of reaction, make once for 
all (and most unjustly) such a comparison as would 
leave the English nowhere. Compare then, I say, 



78 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [in. 

as often as the occasion presents itself. The result 
as regards any particular people, and as regards the 
human race at large, may be pronounced agreeable, 
and the process is both instructive and entertaining. 
So the author of these observations finds it on 
returning to Paris after living for upwards of a year 
in London. He finds himself comparing, and the 
results of comparison are several disjointed reflections, 
of which it may be profitable to make a note. Cer- 
tainly Paris is a very old story, and London is a 
still older one ; and there is no great reason why a 
journey across the channel and back should quicken 
one's perspicacity to an unprecedented degree. I 
therefore will not pretend to have been looking at 
Paris with new eyes, or to have gathered on the 
banks of the Seine a harvest of extraordinary im- 
pressions. I will only pretend that a good many 
old impressions have recovered their freshness, and 
that there is a sort of renovated entertainment in 
looking at the most brilliant city in the world with 
eyes attuned to a different pitch. Never, in fact, 
have those qualities of brightness and gaiety that 
are half the stock-in-trade of the city by the Seine 
seemed to me more uncontestable. The autumn is 
but half over, and Paris is, in common parlance, 
empty. The private houses are closed, the lions 
have returned to the jungle, the Champs Elys^es are 
not at all "mondains." But I have never seen 
Paris more Parisian, in the pleasantest sense of the 
word ; better humoured, more open- windowed, more 
naturally entertaining. A radiant September helps 
the case ; but doubtless the matter is, as I hinted 
above, in a large degree " subjective." For when 



III.] OCCASIONAL PAEIS. 79 

one comes to the point there is nothing very par- 
ticular just now for Paris to rub her hands about. 
The Exhibition of 1878 is looming up as large as a 
mighty mass of buildings on the Trocadero can make 
it. These buildings are very magnificent and fan- 
tastical ; they hang over the Seine, in their sudden 
immensity and glittering newness, like a palace in 
a fairy-tale. But the trouble is that most people 
appear to regard the Exhibition as in fact a fairy- 
tale. They speak of the wonderful structures on the 
Champ de Mars and the Trocadero as a predestined 
monument to the folly of a group of gentlemen 
destitute of a sense of the opportune. The moment 
certainly does not seem very well chosen for inviting 
the world to come to Paris to amuse itself. The 
world is too much occupied with graver cares — with 
reciprocal cannonading and chopping, with cutting 
of throats and burning of homes, with murder of 
infants and mutilation of mothers, with warding off 
famine and civil war, with lamenting the failure of 
its resources, the dulness of trade, the emptiness of 
its pockets. Eome is burning altogether too fast 
for even its most irresponsible spirits to find any 
great satisfaction in fiddling. But even if there is 
(as there very well may be) a certain scepticism 
at headquarters as to the accomplishment of this 
graceful design, there is no apparent hesitation, and 
everything is going forward as rapidly as if mankind 
were breathless with expectation. That familiar 
figure, the Parisian ouvrier, with his white, chalky 
blouse, his attenuated person, his clever face, is more 
familiar than ever, and I suppose, finding plenty of 
work to his hand, is for the time in a comparatively 



80 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [in. 

rational state of mind. He swarms in thousands, 
not only in the region of the Exhibition, but along 
the great thoroughfare — the Avenue de 1' Opera — 
which has just been opened in the interior of Paris. 
This is an extremely Parisian creation, and as it 
is really a great convenience — it will save a great 
many steps and twists and turns — I suppose it 
should be spoken of with gratitude and admiration. 
But I confess that to my sense it belongs primarily 
to that order of benefits which during the twenty 
years of the Empire gradually deprived the streets 
of Paris of nine-tenths of their ancient individuality. 
The deadly monotony of the Paris that M. Hauss- 
mann called into being — its huge, blank, pompous, 
featureless sameness — sometimes comes over the 
wandering stranger with a force that leads him to 
devote the author of these miles of architectural 
commonplace to execration. The new street is 
quite on the imperial system ; it must make the 
late Napoleon III. smile with beatific satisfaction as 
he looks down upon it from the Bonapartist corner 
of Paradise. It stretches straight away from the 
pompous fagade of the Opera to the doors of the 
Theatre Erangais, and it must be admitted that there 
is something fine in the vista that is closed at one 
end by the great sculptured and gilded mass of the 
former building. But it smells of the modern 
asphalt; it is lined with great white houses that 
are adorned with machine-made arabesques, and 
each of which is so exact a copy of all the rest that 
even the little white porcelain number on a blue 
ground, which looks exactly like all the other num- 
bers, hardly constitutes an identity. Presently there 



in.] OCCASIONAL PAKIS. 81 

will be a long succession of milliners' and chocolate- 
makers' shops in the basement of this homogeneous 
row, and the pretty bonnets and bonbonnieres in the 
shining windows will have their ribbons knotted 
with a chic that you must come to Paris to see. 
Then there will be little glazed sentry-boxes at 
regular intervals along the curbstone, in which 
churlish old women will sit selling half a dozen 
copies of each of the newspapers ; and over the 
hardened bitumen the young Parisian of our day 
will constantly circulate, looking rather pallid and 
wearing very large shirt-cuffs. And the new avenue 
will be a great success, for it will place in sym- 
metrical communication two of the most important 
establishments in France — the temple of French 
music and the temple of French comedy. 

I said just now that no two things could well be 
more unlike than England and France ; and though 
the remark is not original, I uttered it with the 
spontaneity that it must have on the lips of a traveller 
who, having left either country, has just disembarked 
in the other. It is of course by this time a very 
trite observation, but it will continue to be made so 
long as Boulogne remains the same lively antithesis 
of Folkestone. An American, conscious of the family- 
likeness diffused over his own huge continent, never 
quite unlearns his surprise at finding that so little 
of either of these two almost contiguous towns has 
rubbed off upon the other. He is surprised at 
certain English people feeling so far away from 
France, and at all French people feeling so far away 
from England. I travelled from Boulogne the other 
day in the same railway-carriage with a couple of 

G 



82 POETEAITS OF PLACES. Lin. 

amiable and ingenuous young Britons, who had come 
over to spend ten days in Paris. It was their first 
landing in France ; they had never yet quitted their 
native island ; and in the course of a little conversa- 
tion that I had with them I was struck with the 
scantiness of their information in regard to French 
manners and customs. They were very intelligent 
lads ; they were apparently fresh from a university ; 
but in respect to the interesting country they were 
about to enter, their minds were almost a blank. 
If the conductor, appearing at the carriage door to 
ask for our tickets, had had the leg of a frog sticking 
out of his pocket, I think their only very definite 
preconception would have been confirmed. I parted 
with them at the Paris station, and I have no doubt 
that they very soon began to make precious dis- 
coveries ; and I have alluded to them not in the 
least to throw ridicule upon their " insularity " — 
which indeed, being accompanied with great modesty, 
I thought a very pretty spectacle — but because 
having become, since my last visit to France, a little 
insular myself, I was more conscious of the emotions 
that attend on an arrival. 

The brightness always seems to begin while you 
are still out in the channel, when you fairly begin 
to see the French coast. You pass into a region 
of intenser light — a zone of clearness and colour. 
These properties brighten and deepen as you ap- 
proach the land, and when you fairly stand upon 
that good Boulognese quay, among the blue and red 
douaniers and soldiers, the small ugly men in cerulean 
blouses, the charming fishwives, with their folded 
kerchiefs and their crisp cap-frills, their short striped 



in.] OCCASIONAL PAKIS. 83 

petticoats, their tightly- drawn stockings, and their 
little clicking sabots — when you look about you at 
the smokeless air, at the pink and yellow houses, at 
the white-fronted cafe\ close at hand, with its bright 
blue letters, its mirrors and marble-topped tables, 
its white-aproned, alert, undignified waiter, grasping 
a huge coffee-pot by a long handle — when you per- 
ceive all these things you feel the additional savour 
that foreignness gives to the picturesque ; or feel 
rather, I should say, that simple foreignness may 
itself make the picturesque ; for certainly the ele- 
ments in the picture I have just sketched are not 
especially exquisite. JSTo matter; you are amused, 
and your amusement continues — being sensibly 
stimulated by a visit to the buffet at the railway- 
station, which is better than the refreshment-room 
at Folkestone. It is a pleasure to have people offer- 
ing you soup again, of their own movement ; it is a 
pleasure to find a little pint of Bordeaux standing 
naturally before your plate ; it is a pleasure to have 
a napkin ; it is a pleasure, above all, to take up one 
of the good long sticks of French bread — as bread 
is called the staff of life, the French bake it literally 
in the shape of staves — and break off a loose, crisp, 
crusty morsel. 

There are impressions, certainly, that imperil 
your good-humour. No honest Anglo-Saxon can 
like a French railway-station ; and I was on the 
point of adding that no honest Anglo-Saxon can 
like a French railway-official. But I will not go 
so far as that ; for after all I cannot remember any 
great harm that such a functionary has ever done 
me — except in locking me up as a malefactor. It 



84 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [in. 

is necessary to say, however, that the honest Anglo- 
Saxon, in a French railway-station, is in a state of 
chronic irritation — an irritation arising from his 
sense of the injurious effect upon the genial French 
nature of the possession of an administrative uniform. 
I believe that the consciousness of brass buttons on 
his coat and stripes on his trousers has spoiled many 
a modest and amiable Frenchman, and the sight of 
these aggressive insignia always stirs within me a 
moral protest. I repeat that my aversion to them 
is partly theoretic, for I have found, as a general 
thing, that an inquiry civilly made extracts a civil 
answer from even the most official-looking personage. 
But I have also found that such a personage's mea- 
sure of the civility due to him is inordinately large ; 
if he places himself in any degree at your service, it 
is apparently from the sense that true greatness can 
afford to unbend. You are constantly reminded 
that you must not presume. In England these 
intimations never proceed from one's " inferiors." 
In France the " administration" is the first thing 
that touches you ; in a little while you get used to 
it, but you feel somehow that, in the process, you 
have lost the flower of your self-respect. Of course 
you are under some obligation to it. It has taken 
you off the steamer at Folkestone ; made you tell 
your name to a gentleman with a sword, stationed 
at the farther end of the plank — not a drawn sword, 
it is true, but still, at the best, a very nasty weapon ; 
marshalled you into the railway-station ; assigned 
you to a carriage — I was going to say to a seat ; 
transported you to Paris, marshalled you again out 
of the train, and under a sort of military surveil- 



in.] OCCASIONAL PARIS. 85 

lance, into an enclosure containing a number of 
human sheep-pens, in one of which it has imprisoned 
you for some half-hour. I am always on the point, in 
these places, of asking one of my gaolers if I may 
not be allowed to walk about on parole. The 
administration at any rate has finally taken you 
out of your pen, and, through the medium of a 
functionary who "inscribes" you in a little book, 
transferred you to a cab selected by a logic of its 
own. In doing all this it has certainly done a 
great deal for you ; but somehow its good offices 
have made you feel sombre and resentful. The 
other day, on arriving from London, while I was 
waiting for my luggage, I saw several of the porters 
who convey travellers' impedimenta to the cab come 
up and deliver over the coin they had just received 
for this service to a functionary posted ad hoc in a 
corner, and armed with a little book in which he 
noted down these remittances. The poitr-boires are 
apparently thrown into a common fund and divided 
among the guild of porters. The system is doubt- 
less an excellent one, excellently carried out; but 
the sight of the poor round-shouldered man of 
burdens dropping his coin into the hand of the 
official arithmetician was to my fancy but another 
reminder that the individual, as an individual, loses 
by all that the administration assumes. 

After living a while in England you observe the 
individual in Paris with quickened attention ; and 
I think it must be said that at first he makes an 
indifferent figure. You are struck with the race 
being physically and personally a poorer one than 
that great family of largely-modelled, fresh-coloured 



86 poktka:ts of places. [m. 

people you have left upon the other side of the 
channel. I remember that in going to England a 
year ago and disembarking of a dismal, sleety Sun- 
day evening at Folkestone, the first thing that struck 
me was the good looks of the railway porters — 
their broad shoulders, their big brown beards, their 
well-cut features. In like manner, landing lately 
at Boulogne of a brilliant Sunday morning, it was 
impossible not to think the little men in numbered 
caps who were gesticulating and chattering in one's 
path, rather ugly fellows. In arriving from other 
countries one is struck with a certain want of 
dignity in the French face. I do not know, how- 
ever, whether this is anything worse than the fact 
that the French face is expressive ; for it may be 
said that, in a certain sense, to express anything is 
to compromise with one's dignity, which likes to be 
understood without taking trouble. As regards the 
lower classes, at any rate, the impression I speak of 
always passes away; you perceive that the good 
looks of the French working-people are to be found 
in their look of intelligence. These people, in 
Paris, strike me afresh as the cleverest, the most 
perceptive, and, intellectually speaking, the most 
human of their kind. The Paris ouvrier, with his 
democratic blouse, his expressive, demonstrative, 
agreeable eye, his meagre limbs, his irregular, pointed 
features, his sallow complexion, his face at once 
fatigued and animated, his light, nervous organisation, 
is a figure that I always encounter again with pleasure. 
In some cases he looks depraved and perverted, but 
at his worst he looks refined ; he is full of vivacity 
of perception, of something that one can appeal to. 



ill.] OCCASIONAL PARIS. 87 

It takes some courage to say this, perhaps, after 
reading L'Assommoir ; but in M. Emile Zola's ex- 
traordinary novel one must make the part, as the 
French say, of the horrible uncleanness of the 
author's imagination. L'Assommoir, I have been 
told, has had great success in the lower walks of 
Parisian life ; and if this fact is not creditable to 
the delicacy of M. Zola's humble readers, it proves 
a good deal in favour of their intelligence. With 
all its grossness the book in question is essentially 
a literary performance ; you must be tolerably 
clever to appreciate it. It is highly appreciated, I 
believe, by the young ladies who live in the region 
of the Latin Quarter — those young ladies who thirty 
years ago were called grisettes, and now are called 
I don't know what. They know long passages by 
heart ; they repeat them with infinite gusto. " Ce 
louchon d' Augustine " — the horrible little girl with 
a squint, who is always playing nasty tricks and 
dodging slaps and projectiles in Gervaise's shop, is 
their particular favourite ; and it must be admitted 
that " ce louchon d' Augustine " is, as regards reality, 
a wonderful creation. 

If Parisians, both small and great, have more of 
the intellectual stamp than the people one sees in 
London, it is striking, on the other hand, that the 
people of the better sort in Paris look very much 
less "respectable." I did not know till I came 
back to Paris how used I had grown to the English 
' cachet ; but I immediately found myself missing it. 
You miss it in the men much more than in the 
women; for the well-to-do Frenchwoman of the 
lower orders, as one sees her in public, in the streets 



88 POKTKAITS OF PLACES. [ill. 

and in shops, is always a delightfully comfortable 
and creditable person. I must confess to the 
highest admiration for her, an admiration that 
increases with acquaintance. She, at least, is 
essentially respectable ; the neatness, compact- 
ness, and sobriety of her dress, the decision of 
her movement and accent suggest the civic and 
domestic virtues — order, thrift, frugality, the moral 
necessity of making a good appearance. It is, I 
think, an old story that to the stranger in France 
the women seem greatly superior to the men. 
Their superiority, in fact, appears to be conceded ; 
for wherever you turn you meet them in the fore- 
front of action. You meet them, indeed, too often ; 
you pronounce them at times obtrusive. It is 
annoying when you go to order your boots or your 
shirts, to have to make known your desires to even 
the most neat-waisted female attendant; for the 
limitations to the feminine intellect are, though few 
in number, distinct, and women are not able to 
understand certain masculine needs. Mr. "Worth 
makes ladies' dresses ; but I am sure there will 
never be a fashionable tailoress. There are, how- 
ever, points at which, from the commercial point 
of view, feminine assistance is invaluable. For 
insisting upon the merits of an article that has 
failed to satisfy you, talking you over, and mak- 
ing you take it ; for defending a disputed bill, 
for paying the necessary compliments or supplying 
the necessary impertinence — for all these things 
the neat-waisted sex has peculiar and precious 
faculties. In the commercial class in Paris the 
man always appeals to the woman ; the woman 



HI.] OCCASIONAL PAEIS. 89 

always steps forward. The woman always pro- 
poses the conditions of a bargain. Go about and 
look for furnished rooms, you always encounter a 
concierge and his wife. When you ask the price 
of the rooms, the woman takes the words out of her 
husband's mouth, if indeed he have not first turned 
to her with a questioning look. She takes you in 
hand ; she proposes conditions ; she thinks of things 
he would not have thought of. 

What I meant just now by my allusion to the 
absence of the " respectable " in the appearance of 
the Parisian population was that the men do not 
look like gentlemen, as so many Englishmen do. 
The average Frenchman that one encounters in 
public is of so different a type from the average 
Englishman that you can easily believe that to the 
end of time the two will not understand each other. 
The Frenchman has always, comparatively speaking, 
a Bohemian, empirical look; the expression of his face, 
its colouring, its movement, have not been toned 
down to the neutral complexion of that breeding 
for which in English speech we reserve the epithet 
of " good." He is at once more artificial and more 
natural; the former where the Englishman is posi- 
tive, the latter where the Englishman is negative. 
He takes off his hat with a flourish to a friend, but 
the Englishman never bows. He ties a knot in 
the end of a napkin and thrusts it into his shirt- 
collar, so that, as he sits at breakfast, the napkin 
may serve the office of a pinafore. Such an opera- 
tion as that seems to the Englishman as naif as the 
flourishing of one's hat is pretentious. 

T sometimes go to breakfast at a cafe on the Boule- 



90 PORTEAITS OF PLACES. [in. 

vard, which I formerly used to frequent with consider- 
able regularity. Coming back there the other day, 
I found exactly the same group of habitues at their 
little tables, and I mentally exclaimed as I looked 
at them over my newspaper, upon their unlikeness 
to the gentlemen who confront you in the same 
attitude at a London club. Who are they ? what 
are they ? On these points I have no information ; 
but the stranger's imagination does not seem to see 
a majestic social order massing itself behind them 
as it usually does in London. He goes so far as 
to suspect that what is behind them is not adapted 
for exhibition ; whereas your Englishmen, whatever 
may be the defects of their personal character, or 
the irregularities of their conduct, are pressed upon 
from the rear by an immense body of private pro- 
prieties and comforts, of domestic conventions and 
theological observances. But it is agreeable all the 
same to come back to a cafe* of which you have for- 
merly been an habitue\ Adolphe or Edouard, in his 
long white apron and his large patent-leather slippers, 
has a perfect recollection of " les habitudes de Mon- 
sieur." He remembers the table you preferred, the 
wine you drank, the newspaper you read. He greets 
you with the friendliest of smiles, and remarks that 
it is a long time since he has had the pleasure of 
seeing Monsieur. There is something in this simple 
remark very touching to a heart that has suffered 
from that incorruptible dumbness of the British 
domestic. But in Paris such a heart finds consola- 
tion at every step ; it is reminded of that most 
classic quality of the French nature — its sociability; 
a sociability which operates here as it never does 



Hi. J OCCASIONAL PARIS. 91 

in England, from below upward. Your waiter 
utters a greeting because, after all, something human 
within him prompts him ; his instinct bids him 
say something, and his taste recommends that it 
be agreeable. The obvious reflection is that a 
waiter must not say too much, even for the sake 
of being human, ' But in France the people always 
like to make the little extra remark, to throw in 
something above the simply necessary. I stop 
before a little man who is selling newspapers at 
a street-corner, and ask him for the Journal des 
Ddbats. His answer deserves to be literally given : 
" Je ne l'ai plus, Monsieur ; mais je pourrai vous 
donner quelquechose a peu pres dans le meme genre 
— la BSjpublique Frangaise." Even a person of his 
humble condition must have had a lurking sense of 
the comicality of offering anything as an equivalent 
for the " genre " of the venerable, classic, academic 
DSbats. But my friend could not bear to give me 
a naked, monosyllabic refusal. 

There are two things that the returning observer 
is likely to do with as little delay as possible. 
One is to dine at some cabaret of which he retains a 
friendly memory ; another is to betake himself to the 
Theatre Erancais. It is early in the season; there 
are no new pieces ; but I have taken great pleasure 
in seeing some of the old ones. I lost no time in 
going to see Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt in 
Andromaque. Andromaque is not a novelty, but 
Mademoiselle Sarah Bernhardt has a perennial 
freshness. The play has been revived, to enable, 
her to represent not the great part, the injured and 
passionate Hermione, but that of the doleful 



92 PORrBAITS OF PLACES. [in. 

funereal widow of Hector. This part is a poor 
one; it is narrow and monotonous, and offers few 
brilliant opportunities. But the actress knows how 
to make opportunities, and she has here a very 
sufficient one for crossing her thin white arms over 
her nebulous black robes, and sighing forth in silver 
accents her dolorous rhymes. Her rendering of the 
part is one more proof of her singular intelligence 
— of the fineness of her artistic nature. As there 
is not a great deal to be done with it in the way of 
declamation, she has made the most of its plastic 
side. She understands the art of motion and at- 
titude as no one else does, and her extraordinary 
personal grace never fails her. Her Andromaque 
has postures of the most poetic picturesqueness — 
something that suggests the broken stem and droop- 
ing head of a flower that had been rudely plucked. 
She bends over her classic confidant like the figure 
of Bereavement on a bas-relief, and she has a 
marvellous manner of lifting and throwing back 
her delicate arms, locking them together, and passing 
them behind her hanging head. 

The, Demi-Monde of M. Dumas fits is not a novelty 
either; but I quite agree with M. Francisque Sarcey 
that it is on the whole, in form, the first comedy of 
our day. I have seen it several times, but I never 
see it without being forcibly struck with its merits. 
For the drama of our time it must always remain 
the model. The interest of the story, the quiet art 
with which it is unfolded, the naturalness and 
soberness of the means that are used, and by which 
great effects are produced, the brilliancy and rich- 
ness of the dialogue — all these things make it a 



HI.] OCCASIONAL PAKIS. 93 

singularly perfect and interesting work. Of course 
it is admirably well played at the Theatre Francais. 
Madame d'Ange was originally a part of too great 
amplitude for Mademoiselle Croizette; but she is 
gradually filling it out and taking possession of it ; 
she begins to give a sense of the " calme infernal," 
which George Sand somewhere mentions as the 
leading attribute of the character. As for Delau- 
nay, he does nothing better, more vividly and 
gallantly, than Olivier de Jalin. When I say 
gallantry I say it with qualification; for what a 
very queer fellow is this same M. de Jalin ! In 
seeing the Demi -Monde again I was more than 
ever struck with the oddity of its morality and 
with the way that the ideal of fine conduct differs 
in different nations. The Demi- Monde is the 
history of the eager, the almost heroic, effort of a 
clever and superior woman, who has been guilty of 
what the French call "faults," to pass from the 
irregular and equivocal circle to which these faults 
have consigned her into what is distinctively termed 
" good society." The only way in which the pas- 
sage can be effected is by her marrying an honour- 
able man; and to induce an honourable man to 
marry her, she must suppress the more discredit- 
able facts of her career. Taking her for an honest 
woman, Eaymond de Nanjac falls in love with her, 
and honestly proposes to make her his wife. But 
Eaymond de Nanjac has contracted an intimate 
friendship with Olivier de Jalin, and the action of 
the play is more especially De Jalin's attempt — a 
successful one — to rescue his friend from the igno- 
miny of a union with Suzanne d'Ange. Jalin 



94 POETRAITS OF PLACES. [ill. 

knows a great deal about her, for the simple reason 
that he has been her lover. Their relations have 
been most harmonious, but from the moment that 
Suzanne sets her cap at Nanjac, Olivier declares 
war. Suzanne struggles hard to keep possession of 
her suitor, who is very much in love with her, and 
Olivier spares no pains to detach him. It is the 
means that Olivier uses that excite the wonder- 
ment of the Anglo-Saxon spectator. He takes the 
ground that in such a cause all means are fair, and 
when, at the climax of the play, he tells a thump- 
ing lie in order to make Madame d'Ange compromise 
herself, expose herself, he is pronounced by the author 
"le plus honnete homme que je connaisse." Madame 
d'Ange, as I have said, is a superior woman ; the 
interest of the play is in her being a superior 
woman. Olivier has been her lover ; he himself is 
one of the reasons why she may not marry Nanjac ; 
he has given her a push along the downward path. 
But it is curious how little this is held by the author 
to disqualify him from fighting the battle in which 
she is so much the weaker combatant. An English- 
speaking audience is more " moral " than a French, 
more easily scandalised ; and yet it is a singular 
fact that if the Demi-Monde were represented before 
an English-speaking audience, its sympathies would 
certainly not go with M. de Jalin. It would 
pronounce him rather a coward. Is it because 
such an audience, although it has not nearly such a 
pretty collection of pedestals to place under the 
feet of the charming sex, has, after all, in default of 
this degree of gallantry, a tenderness more fun- 
damental ? Madame d'Ange has stained her- 



III.] OCCASIONAL PARIS. 95 

self, and it is doubtless not at all proper that 
such ladies should be led to the altar by honour- 
able young men. The point is not that the 
English- speaking audience would be disposed to 
condone Madame d'Ange's irregularities, but that it 
would remain perfectly cold before the spectacle of 
her ex-lover's masterly campaign against her, and 
quite fail to think it positively admirable, or to 
regard the fib by which he finally clinches his 
victory as a proof of exceptional honesty. The 
ideal of our own audience would be expressed in 
some such words as, " I say, that's not fair game. 
Can't you let the poor woman alone ? " 



IV. 

EHEIMS AND LAON: A LITTLE TOUR. 

1877. 

It was a very little tour, but the charm of the 
three or four old towns and monuments that it 
embraced, the beauty of the brilliant October, the 
pleasure of reminding one's self how much of the 
interest, strength and dignity of France is to be 
found outside of that huge pretentious caravansary 
called Paris (a reminder often needed), these things 
deserve to be noted. I went down to Eheims to 
see the famous cathedral, and to reach Eheims I 
travelled through the early morning hours along 
the charming valley of the Marne. The Marne is 
a pretty little green river, the vegetation upon 
whose banks, otherwise unadorned, had begun to 
blush with the early frosts in a manner that 
suggested the autumnal tints of American scenery. 
The trees and bushes were scarlet and orange; the 
light was splendid and a trifle harsh ; I could have 
fancied myself immersed in an American "fall," if at 
intervals some gray old large-towered church had 
not lifted a sculptured front above a railway-station, 
to dispel the fond illusion. One of these church- 



IV.] RHEIMS AND LAON : A LITTLE TOUE. 97 

fronts (I saw it only from the train) is particularly 
impressive ; the little cathedral of Meaux, of which 
the great Bossuet was bishop, and along whose frigid 
nave he set his eloquence rolling with an impetus 
which it has not wholly lost to this day. It was 
entertaining, moreover, to enter the country of 
champagne ; for Eheims is in the ancient province 
whose later fame is syllabled the world over in 
popping corks. A land of vineyards is not usually 
accounted sketchable ; but the country about Eper- 
nay seemed to me to have a charm of its own. 
It stretched away in soft undulations that were 
pricked all over with little stakes muffled in leaves. 
The effect at a distance was that of vast surfaces, 
long, subdued billows, of pincushion; and yet it 
was very pretty. The deep blue sky was over the 
scene ; the undulations were half in sun and half 
in shade ; and here and there, among their myriad 
bristles, were groups of vintagers, who, though they 
are in reality, doubtless, a prosaic and mercenary 
body of labourers, yet assumed, to a fancy that 
glanced at them in the cursory manner permitted 
by the passage of the train, the appearance of 
joyous and disinterested votaries of Bacchus. The 
blouses of the men, the white caps of the women, 
were gleaming in the sunshine ; they moved about 
crookedly among the tiny vine-poles. I thought 
them full of a charming suggestiveness. Of all the 
delightful gifts of France to the world, this was one 
of the most agreeable — the keen, living liquid in 
which the finest flower of sociability is usually 
dipped. It came from these sunny places ; this 
little maze of curling-sticks supplied the world with 

H 



98 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [iv. 

half the world's gaiety. I call it little only in 
relation to the immense number of bottles with 
gilded necks in which this gaiety is annually stored 
up. The acreage of the champagne seemed to me, 
in fact, large ; the bristling slopes went rolling away 
to new horizons in a manner that was positively 
reassuring. Making the handsomest allowance for 
the wine manufactured from baser elements, it was 
apparent that this big corner of a province repre- 
sents a very large number of bottles. 

As you draw near to Eheims the vineyards be- 
come sparser, and finally disappear, a fact not to 
be regretted, for there is something incongruous in 
the juxtaposition of champagne and gothic architec- 
ture. It may be said, too, that for the proper 
appreciation of a structure like the cathedral of 
Eheims you have need of all your head. As, after 
my arrival, I sat in my window at the inn, gazing 
up at the great facade, I found something dizzying 
in the mere climbing and soaring of one's astonished 
vision ; and later, when I came to wander about in 
the upper regions of the church, and to peep down 
through the rugged lacework of the towers at the 
little streets and the small spots of public places, I 
found myself musing upon the beauty of soberness. 
My window at the Lion d'Or was like a proscenium- 
box at the play; to admire the cathedral at my 
leisure I had only to perch myself in the casement 
with a good opera -glass. I sat there for a long 
time watching the great architectural drama. A 
drama I may call it, for no church -front that I 
have seen is more animated, more richly figured. 
The density of the sculptures, the immense scale of 



IV.] EHEIMS AND LAON : A LITTLE TOUR. 99 

the images, detract, perhaps, at first, in a certain 
sense, from the impressiveness of the cathedral of 
Eheims ; the absence of large surfaces, of ascending 
lines, deceives you as to the elevation of the front, 
and the dimensions of some of the upper statues 
bring them unduly near the eye. But little by 
little you perceive that this great figured and 
storied screen has a mass proportionate to its 
detail, and that it is the grandest part of a struc- 
ture which, as a whole, is one of the noblest works 
of man's hands. Most people remember to have 
seen some print or some photograph of this heavily- 
charged faQade of Eheims, which is usually put 
forward as the great example of the union of the 
purity and the possible richness of gothic. I must 
first have seen some such print in my earliest years, 
for I have always thought of Eheims as the typical 
gothic cathedral. I had vague associations with it ; 
it seemed to me that I had already stood there in 
the little overwhelmed place. One's literary associa- 
tions with Eheims are indeed very vivid and impres- 
sive ; they begin with the picture of the steel-clad 
Maid passing under the deeply-sculptured portal, with 
a banner in her hand which she has no need to 
lower, and while she stands amid the incense and 
the chants, the glitter of arms and the glow of 
coloured lights, asking leave of the young king whom 
she has crowned to turn away and tend her flocks. 
And after that there is the sense of all the kings of 
France having travelled down to Eheims in their 
splendour to be consecrated ; the great groups 
on the front of the church must have looked down 
on groups almost as stately — groups full of colour 

L.ofC. 



100 POETRAITS OF PLACES. [iv. 

and movement — assembled in the square. (The 
square of Eheims, it must be confessed, is rather 
shabby. It is singular that the august ceremony 
of the sacre should not have left its mark upon the 
disposition of the houses, should not have kept 
them at a respectful distance. Louis XIV., smooth- 
ing his plumage before he entered' - the church, can 
hardly have had space to swing the train of his 
coronation-robe.) But when in driving into the 
town I reached the small precinct, such as it is, 
and saw the cathedral lift its spireless towers above 
the long rows of its carven saints, the huge wheel 
of its window, the three great caverns of its portals, 
with the high acute pediments above each arch, and 
the sides abutting outward like the beginning of a 
pyramid ; when I looked at all this I felt that I 
had carried it in my mind from my earliest years, 
and that the stately vision had been implanted 
there by some forgotten glimpse of an old-fashioned 
water-colour sketch, in which the sky was washed 
in with expressive splashes, the remoter parts of 
the church tinted with a fascinating blueness, and 
the foundations represented as encumbered with 
little gabled and cross-timbered houses, inhabited 
by women in red petticoats and curious caps. 

I shall not attempt any regular enumeration of 
the great details of the fagade of Eheims ; I cannot 
profess even to have fully apprehended them. They 
are a glorious company, and here and there, on its 
high-hung pedestal, one of the figures detaches itself 
with peculiar effectiveness. Over the central portal 
sits the Virgin Mary, meekly submitting her head to 
the ponderous crown which her Son prepares to place 



IV.] RHEIMS AND LAON : A LITTLE TOUR. 101 

upon it; the attitude and movement of Christ are full 
of a kind of splendid politeness. The three great door- 
ways are in themselves a museum of imagery, dis- 
posed in each case in five close tiers, the statues in 
each of the tiers packed perpendicularly against their 
comrades. The effect of these great hollowed and 
chiselled recesses is extremely striking ; they are a 
proper vestibule to the dusky richness of the interior. 
The cathedral of Eheims, more fortunate than many of 
its companions, appears not to have suffered from the 
iconoclasts of the Eevolution ; I noticed no absent 
heads nor broken noses. It is very true that these 
members may have had adventures to which they 
do not, as it were, allude. But, like many of its 
companions, it is so pressed upon by neighbouring 
houses that it is not easy to get a general view of 
the sides and the rear. You may walk round it, 
and note your walk as a long one ; you may observe 
that the choir of the church travels back almost into 
another quarter of the city; you may see the far- 
spreading mass lose itself for a while in parasitic 
obstructions, and then emerge again with all its 
buttresses flying ; but you miss that wide margin of 
space and light which should enable it to present 
itself as a consistent picture. Pictures have their 
frames, and poems have their margins ; a great work 
of art, such as a gothic cathedral, should at least 
have elbow-room. You may, however, stroll beneath 
the walls of Eheims, along a narrow, dark street, 
and look up at the mighty structure and see its 
higher parts foreshortened into all kinds of delusive 
proportions. There is a grand entertainment in the 
view of the church which you obtain from the 



102 POETEAI1S OF PLACES. [iv. 

farthermost point to which you may recede from it 
in the rear, keeping it still within sight. I have 
never seen a cathedral so magnificently buttressed. 
The buttresses of Eheims are all double ; they have 
a tremendous spring, and are supported upon pede- 
stals surmounted by immense crocketed canopies 
containing statues of wide-winged angels. A great 
balustrade of gothic arches connects these canopies 
one with another, and along this balustrade are 
perched strange figures of sitting beasts, unicorns 
and mermaids, griffins and monstrous owls. Huge, 
terrible gargoyles hang far over into the street, and 
doubtless some of them have a detail which I after- 
wards noticed at Laon. The gargoyle represents a 
grotesque beast — a creature partaking at once of the 
shape of a bird, a fish, and a quadruped. At Laon, 
on either side of the main entrance, a long-bellied 
monster cranes forth into the air with the head of a 
hippopotamus ; and under its belly crouches a little 
man, hardly less grotesque, making up a rueful 
grimace and playing some ineffectual trick upon his 
terrible companion. One of these little' figures has 
plunged a sword, up to the hilt, into the belly of the 
monster above him, so that when he draws it forth 
there will be a leak in the great stone gutter ; an- 
other has suspended himself to a rope that is knotted 
round the neck of the gargoyle, and is trying in the 
same manner to interrupt its functions by pulling 
the cord as tight as possible. There was sure to be 
a spirit of life in an architectural conception that 
could range from the combination of clustering 
towers and opposing fronts to this infinitely minute 
play of humour. 



xv.] EHEIMS AND LAON : A LITTLE TOUE. 103 

There is no great play of humour in the interior 
of Eheims, but there is a great deal of beauty and 
solemnity. This interior is a spectacle that excites 
the sensibility, as our forefathers used to say ; but it 
is not an easy matter to describe. It is no descrip- 
tion of it to say that it is four hundred and sixty-six 
feet in length, and that the roof is one hundred and 
twenty-four feet above the pavement ; nor is there 
any very vivid portraiture in the statement that if 
there is no coloured glass in the lower windows, there 
is, per contra, a great deal of the most gorgeous and 
most ancient in the upper ones. The long sweep of 
the nave, from the threshold to the point where the 
coloured light-shafts of the choir lose themselves 
in the gray distance, is a triumph of perpendicular 
perspective. The white light in the lower part of 
Eheims really contributes to the picturesqueness of 
the interior. It makes the gloom above look richer 
still, and throws that part of the roof which rests 
upon the gigantic piers of the transepts into mysteri- 
ous remoteness. I wandered about for a long time; 
I sat first in one place and then in another ; I 
attached myself to that most fascinating part of every 
great church, the angle at which the nave and tran- 
sept divide. It was the better to observe this 
interesting point, I think, that I passed into the side 
gate of the choir— the gate that stood ajar in the 
tall gilded railing. I sat down on a stool near the 
threshold ; I leaned back against the side of one of 
the stalls ; the church was empty, and I lost myself 
in the large perfection of the place. I lost myself, 
but the beadle found me ; he stood before me, and 
with a silent, imperious gesture, motioned me to 



104 POETKAITS OF PLACES. [iv. 

depart. I risked an argumentative glance, where- 
upon he signified his displeasure, repeated his ges- 
ture, and pointed to an old gentleman with a red 
cape, who had come into the choir softly, without my 
seeing him, and had seated himself in one of the 
stalls. This old gentleman seemed plunged in pious 
thoughts ; I was not, after all, very near him, and 
he did not look as if I disturbed him. A canon is 
at any time, I imagine, a more merciful man than a 
beadle. But of course I obeyed the beadle, and 
eliminated myself from this peculiarly sacred precinct. 
I found another chair, and I fell to admiring the 
cathedral again. But this time I think it was with 
a difference — a difference which may serve as an 
excuse for the triviality of my anecdote. Sundry 
other old gentlemen in red capes emerged from the 
sacristy and went into the choir; presently, when 
there were half a dozen, they began to chant, and I 
perceived that the impending vespers had been the 
reason of my expulsion. This was highly proper, and 
I forgave the beadle; but I was not so happy as before^ 
for my thoughts had passed out of the architectural 
channel into — what shall I say ? — into the political. 
Here they found nothing so sweet to feed upon. 
It was the 5th of October ; ten days later the elec- 
tions for the new Chamber were to take place — the 
Chamber which was to replace the Assembly dissolved 
on th~ 16th of May by Marshal MacMahon, on a 
charge of " latent " radicalism. Stranger though 
one was, it was impossible not to be much interested 
in the triumph of the republican cause ; it was im- 
possible not to sympathise with this supreme effort 
of a brilliant and generous people to learn the lesson 



IV.] EHEIMS AND LAON : A LITTLE TOUR. 105 

of national self-control and self-government. It was 
impossible by the same token, not to have noted and 
detested the alacrity with which the Catholic party 
had rallied to the reactionary cause, and the unction 
with which the clergy had converted itself into the 
go-betweens of Bonapartism. The clergy was giving 
daily evidence of its devotion to arbitrary rule and 
to every iniquity that shelters itself behind the mask 
of " authority." These had been frequent and 
irritating reflections; they lurked in the folds of 
one's morning paper. They came back to me in the 
midst of that tranquil grandeur of Eheims, as I 
listened to the droning of the old gentlemen in the 
red capes. Some of the canons, it was painful to 
observe, had not been punctual ; they came hurrying 
out of the sacristy after the service had begun. 
They looked like amiable and venerable men; their 
chanting and droning, as it spread itself under the 
great arches, was not disagreeable to listen to ; "I 
could certainly bear them no grudge. But their 
presence there was distracting and vexatious ; it had 
spoiled my enjoyment of their church, in which I 
doubtless had no business. It had set me thinking 
of the activity and vivacity of the great organisation 
to which they belonged, and of all the odious things 
it would have done before the 15th of October. To 
what base uses do we come at last ! It was this 
same organisation that had erected the magnificent 
structure around and above me, and which had then 
seemed an image of generosity and benignant power. 
Such an edifice might at times make one feel tenderly 
sentimental toward the Catholic church — make one 
remember how many of the great achievements of 



106 PORTE AITS OF PLACES. [iv. 

the past we owe to her. To lapse gently into this 
state of mind seems indeed always, while one strolls 
about a great cathedral, a proper recognition of its 
hospitality ; but now I had lapsed gently out of it, 
and it was one of the exasperating elements of the 
situation that I felt, in a manner, called upon to de- 
cide how far such a lapse was unbecoming. I found 
myself even extending the question a little, and 
picturing to myself that conflict which must often 
occur at such a moment as the present — which is 
actually going on, doubtless, in many thousands of 
minds — between the actively, practically liberal in- 
stinct and what one may call the historic, aesthetic 
sense, the sense upon which old cathedrals lay a 
certain palpable obligation. How far should a lover 
of old cathedrals let his hands be tied by the sanctity 
of their traditions ? How far should he let his 
imagination bribe him, as it were, from action ? This 
of course is a question for each man to answer for 
himself; but as I sat listening to the drowsy old 
canons of Eheims, I was visited, I scarcely know 
why, by a kind of revelation of the anti-catholic 
passion, as it must burn to-day in the breasts of 
certain radicals. I felt that such persons must 
be intent upon war to the death ; how that must 
seem the most sacred of all duties. Can anything, 
in the line of action, for a votary of the radical 
creed, be more sacred ? I asked myself ; and can any 
instruments be too trenchant ? I raised my eyes 
again to the dusky splendour of the upper aisles and 
measured their enchanting perspective, and it was 
with a sense of doing them full justice that I gave 
my Active liberal my good wishes. 



IV.] EHEIMS AND LAON : A LITTLE TOUR. 107 

This little operation restored my equanimity, so 
that I climbed several hundred steps and wandered 
lightly over the roof of the cathedral. Climbing 
into cathedral-towers and gaping at the size of the 
statues that look small. from the street has always 
seemed to me a rather brutal pastime ; it is not the 
proper way to treat a beautiful building ; it is like 
holding one's nose so close to a picture that one sees 
only the grain of the canvas. But when once I had 
emerged into the upper wilderness of Eheims the 
discourse of a very urbane and appreciative old bell- 
ringer, whom I found lurking behind some gigantic 
excrescence, gave an aesthetic complexion to what 
would otherwise have been a rather vulgar feat of 
gymnastics. It was very well to see what a great 
cathedral is made of, and in these high places of the 
immensity of Eheims I found the matter very im- 
pressively illustrated. I wandered for half an hour 
over endless expanses of roof, along the edge of 
sculptured abysses, through hugely -timbered attics 
and chambers that were in themselves as high as 
churches. I stood knee-high to strange images, of 
unsuspected proportions, and I followed the topmost 
staircase of one of the towers, which curls upward 
like the groove of a corkscrew, and gives you at the 
summit a hint of how a sailor feels at the masthead. 
The ascent was worth making to learn the fulness 
of beauty of the church, the solidity and perfection, 
the mightiness of arch and buttress, the latent in- 
genuity of detail. At the angles of the balustrade 
which ornaments the roof of the choir are perched a 
series of huge sitting eagles, which from below, as 
you look up at them, produce a great effect. They 



108 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [ir. 

are immense, grim-looking birds, and the sculptor 
has given to each of them a pair of very neatly 
carved human legs, terminating in talons. Why did 
he give them human legs ? Why did he indulge in 
this ridiculous conceit ? I am unable to say, but the 
conceit afforded me pleasure. It seemed to tell of 
an imagination always at play, fond of the unex- 
pected and delighting in its labour. 

Apart from its cathedral Eheims is not an inter- 
esting city. It has a prosperous, modern, mercantile 
air. The streets look as if at one time M. Hauss- 
mann, in person, may have taken a good deal of 
exercise in them ; they prove, however, that a French 
provincial town may be a wonderfully fresh, clean, 
comfortable -looking place. Very different is the 
aspect of the ancient city of Laon, to which you may, 
by the assistance of the railway, transfer yourself 
from Eheims in a little more than an hour. Laon 
is full of history, and the place, as you approach it, 
reminds you of a quaint woodcut in the text of an 
ancient folio. Out of the midst of a smiling plain 
rises a goodly mountain, and on the top of the moun- 
tain is perched the old feudal commune, from the 
centre of which springs, with infinite majesty, the 
many-towered cathedral. At Laon you are in the 
midst of old France ; it is one of the most interest- 
ing chapters of the past. Ever since reading in the 
pages of M. Thierry the story of the fierce struggle 
for municipal independence waged by this ardent 
little city against its feudal and ecclesiastical lords, 
I had had the conviction that Laon was worthy of a 
visit. All the more so that her two hundred years 
of civic fermentation had been vainly spent, and 



IV.] RHEIMS AND LAON : A LITTLE TOUR. 109 

that in the early part of the fourteenth century she 
had been disfranchised without appeal. M. Thierry's 
readers will remember the really thrilling interest of 
the story which he has selected as the most complete 
and typical among those of which the records of the 
mediaeval communities are full; the complications 
and fluctuations of the action, its brilliant episodes, 
its sombre, tragic dinolXment. I did not visit Laon 
with the Lettres sur VHistoire de France in my pocket, 
nor had I any other historic texts for reference; 
but a vague notion of the vigorous manner in which 
for a couple of centuries the stubborn little town 
had attested its individuality supplied my observa- 
tions with an harmonious background. Nothing can 
well be more picturesque than the position of this 
interesting city. The tourist who has learned his 
trade can tell a " good " place at a glance. The 
moment Laon became visible from the window of 
the train I perceived that Laon was good. And then 
I had the word for it of an extremely intelligent 
young officer of artillery, who shared my railway- 
carriage in coming from Eheims, and who spoke with 
an authority borrowed from three years of garrison- 
life on that windy hill-top. He affirmed that the 
only recreation it afforded was a walk round the 
ramparts which encircle the town ; people went down 
the hill as little as possible — it was such a dreadful 
bore to come up again. But he declared, neverthe- 
less, that, as an intelligent traveller, I should be 
enchanted with the place ; that the cathedral was 
magnificent, the view of the surrounding country 
a perpetual entertainment, and the little town full 
of originality. After I had spent a day there I 



110 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [iv. 

thought of this pleasant young officer and his familiar 
walk upon the city-wall ; he gave a point to my in- 
evitable reflections upon the degree to which at the 
present hour, in France, the front of the stage is 
occupied by the army. Inevitable reflections, I say, 
because the net result of any little tour that one may 
make just now is a vivid sense of red trousers and 
cropped heads. Wherever you go you come upon a 
military quarter, you stumble upon a group of young 
citizens in uniform. It is always a pretty spectacle ; 
they enliven the scene ; they touch it here and there 
with an effusion of colour. But this is not the 
whole of the matter, and when you have admitted 
that it is pictorial to be always sous Us armes, you 
fall to wondering whether it is not very expensive. 
A million of defenders take up a good deal of room, 
even for defenders. It must be very uncomfortable 
to be always defending. How do the young men 
bear it ; how does France bear it ; how long will she 
be able to keep it up ? Every young Frenchman, 
on reaching maturity, has to give up five years of 
his life to this bristling Minotaur of military service. 
It is hard for a nation of shameless civilians to 
understand how life is arranged among people who 
come into the world with this heavy mortgage upon 
the freshest years of their strength; it seems like 
drinking the wine of life from a vessel with a great 
leak in the bottom. Is such a regime inspiring, or 
is it demoralising ? Is the effect of it to quicken 
the sentiment of patriotism, the sense of the dangers 
to which one's country is exposed and of what one 
owes to the common cause, or to take the edge from 
all ambition that is not purely military, to force 



IV.] EHEIMS AND LAON : A LITTLE TOUR. Ill 

young men to say that there is no use trying, that 
nothing is worth beginning, and that a young fellow 
condemned to pay such a tax as that has a right to 
refund himself in any way that is open to him ? 
Reminded as one is at every step of the immensity 
of the military burden of France, the most interest- 
ing point seems to me not its economical but its 
moral bearing. Its effect upon the finances of the 
country may be accurately computed ; its effect upon 
the character of the young generation is more of 
a mystery. As the analytic tourist wanders of an 
autumn afternoon upon the planted rampart of an 
ancient town and meets young soldiers strolling in 
couples or leaning against the parapet and looking 
off at the quiet country, he is apt to take the more 
genial view of the dreadful trade of arms. He is 
disposed to say that it teaches its votaries something 
that is worth knowing and yet is not learned in 
several other trades — the hardware, say, or the dry- 
goods business. Five years is a good deal to ask of 
a young life as a sacrifice ; but the sacrifice is in 
some ways a gain. Certainly, apart from the ques- 
tion of material defence, it may be said that no 
European nation, at present, can afford, morally, not 
to pass her young men, the hope of the country, 
through the military mill. It does for them some- 
thing indispensable ; it toughens, hardens, solidifies 
them ; gives them an ideal of honour, of some other 
possibility in life than making a fortune. A country 
in which the other trades I spoke of have it all their 
own way appears, in comparison, less educated. 

So I mused, as I strolled in the afternoon along 
the charming old city - wall at Laon ; and if my 



112 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. \)v. 

meditations seem pretentious or fallacious, I must 
say in justice that I had been a good while coming 
to them. I had done a great many things first. I 
had climbed up the long straight staircase which has 
been dropped like a scaling-ladder from one of the 
town-gates to the bottom of the hill. Laon still has 
her gates as she still has her wall, and one of these, 
the old Porte d'Ardon, is a really precious relic of 
mediaeval architecture. I had repaired to the sign 
of the Hure — a portrait of this inhospitable beast is 
swung from the front of the inn — and bespoken a 
a lodging ; I had spent a long time in the cathedral, 
in it and before it, beside it, behind it ; I had walked 
all over the town, from the citadel, at one end of 
the lofty plateau on which it stands, to the artillery- 
barracks and the charming old church of St. Martin 
at the other. The cathedral of Laon has not the 
elaborate grandeur of that of Eheims ; but it is a 
very noble and beautiful church. Nothing can be 
finer than its position ; it would set off any church 
to stand on such a hill -crest. Laon has also a 
fagade of many sculptures, which, however, has suf- 
fered greater violence than that of Rheims, and is 
now being carefully and delicately restored. Whole 
figures and bas-reliefs have lately been replaced by 
exact imitations in that fresh white French stone 
which looks at first like a superior sort of plaster. 
They were far gone, and I suppose the restorer's 
hand was imperiously called for. I do not know 
that it has been too freely used. But half the charm 
of Laon is the magnificent colouring of brownish, 
weather -battered gray which it owes to the great 
exposure of its position, and it will be many a year 



IV.] EHEIMS AND LAON : A LITTLE TOUE. 113 

before the chalky scars and patches will be wrought 
into dusky harmony with the rest of the edifice. 
Fortunately, however, they promise not to be very 
numerous ; the principal restorations have taken 
place inside. I know not what all this labour costs ; 
but I was interested in learning from the old bell- 
ringer at Eheims that the sum voted by the Chamber 
for furbishing up his own church was two millions 
of francs, to be expended during ten years. That is 
what it is to have " national monuments " to keep 
up. One is apt to think of the fourteenth century 
as a rather ill-appointed and comfortless period ; but 
the fact that at the present time the mere repair of 
one of its buildings costs forty thousand dollars a 
year would indicate that the original builders had 
a great deal of money to spend. The cathedral of 
Laon was intended to be a wonderful cluster of 
towers, but only two of these ornaments — the 
couple above the west front — have been carried to 
a great altitude ; the pedestals of the rest, however, 
detach themselves with much vigour, and contribute 
to the complicated and somewhat fantastic look 
which the church wears at a distance, and which 
makes its great effectiveness. The finished towers 
are admirably light and graceful ; with the sky shin- 
ing through their large interstices they suggest an 
imitation of timber in masonry. They have one 
very quaint feature. From their topmost portions, 
at each angle, certain carven heads of oxen peep 
forward with a startling naturalness — a tribute to 
the patient, powerful beasts who dragged the mate- 
rial of the building up the long zig-zags of the 
mountain. We perhaps treat our dumb creatures 

l 



114 POETRAITS OF PLACES. [iv. 

better to-day than was done five hundred years ago ; 
but I doubt whether a modern architect, in settling 
his accounts, would have " remembered," as they 
say, the oxen. 

The whole precinct of the cathedral of Laon 
is picturesque. There is a charming Palais de 
Justice beside it, separated from it by a pleasant, 
homely garden, in which, as you walk about, you 
have an excellent view of the towering back and 
sides of the great church. The Palais de Justice, 
which is an ancient building, has a fine old gothic 
arcade, and on the other side, directly upon the city- 
wall, a picturesque, irregular rear, with a row of 
painted windows, through which, from the salle 
d'audience, the judge on the bench and the prisoner 
in the dock may enjoy a prospect, admonitory, in- 
spiring, or depressing, as the case may be, of the 
expanded country. This great sea-like plain that 
lies beneath the town on all sides constitutes, for 
Laon, a striking resemblance to those Italian cities 
—Siena, Volterra, Perugia — which the traveller 
remembers so fondly as a dark silhouette lifted high 
against a glowing sunset. There is something Italian, 
too, in the mingling of rock and rampart in the old 
foundations of the town, and in the generous ver- 
dure in which these are muffled. At one end of 
the hill-top the plateau becomes a narrow ridge ; 
the slope makes a deep indentation, which contri- 
butes to the effect of a thoroughly Italian picture. 
A line of crooked little red-roofed houses stands on 
the edge of this indentation, with their feet in the 
tangled verdure that blooms in it ; and above them 
rises a large, florid, deserted-looking church, which 



IV.] RHEIMS AND LAON : A LITTLE TOUE. 115 

you may be sure lias a little empty, grass-grown, out- 
of-the-way place before it. Almost opposite, on 
another spur of the hill, the gray walls of a sup- 
pressed convent peep from among the trees. I 
might have been at Perugia. 

There came in the evening to the inn of the 
Hure a very worthy man who had vehicles to hire. 
The Hure was decidedly a provincial hostelry, and I 
compared it mentally with certain English establish- 
ments of a like degree, of which I had lately had 
observation. In England I should have had a waiter 
in an old evening -suit and a white cravat, who 
would have treated me to cold meat and bread and 
cheese. There would have been a musty little inn- 
parlour and probably a very good fire in the grate, 
and the festally -attired waiter would have been my 
sole entertainer. At Laon I was in perpetual inter- 
course with the landlord and his wife, and a large 
body of easy-going, confidential domestics. Our 
intercourse was carried on in an old darksome stone 
kitchen, with shining copper vessels hanging all 
over the walls, in which I was free to wander about 
and take down my key in one place and rummage 
out my candlestick in another, while the domestics 
sat at table eating pot-au-feu. The landlord cooked 
the dinner ; he wore a white cap and apron ; he 
brought in the first dish at the table d'hote. Of 
course there was a table d'hote, with several lamps 
and a long array of little dessert-dishes, for the 
benefit of two commercial travellers, who tucked 
their napkins into their necks, and the writer of 
these lines. Every country has its manners. In 
England the benefits — whatever they are — repre- 



116 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. Liv. 

sented by the evening dress of the waiter would have 
been most apparent ; in France one was more sensible 
of the blessings of which the white cap and apron 
of the host were a symbol. In England, certainly, 
one is treated more as a gentleman. It is. too often 
forgotten, however, that even a gentleman partakes 
of nourishment. But I am forgetting my dispenser 
of vehicles, concerning whom, however, and whose 
large red cheeks and crimson cravat, I have left 
myself room to say no more than that they were 
witnesses of a bargain that I should be driven early 
on the morrow morning, in an " Americaine," to the 
Chateau de Coucy. The Americaine proved to be 
a vehicle of which I should not have been eager to 
claim the credit for my native land ; but with the 
aid of a ragged but resolute little horse, and a driver 
so susceptible as regards his beast's appearance that, 
referring to the exclamation of dismay with which 
I had greeted it, he turned to me at the end of each 
successive kilometre with a rancorous " Now, do you^ 
say he can't go ? " — with these accessories, I say, it 
conveyed me more than twenty miles. It was en- 
tertaining to wind down the hillside from Laon in 
the early morning of a splendid autumn day; to 
dip into the glistening plain, all void of hedges and 
fences, and sprinkled with light and dew; to jog 
along the straight white roads, between the tall, thin 
poplars ; to rattle through the half- waked villages 
and past the orchards heavy with sour-looking crim- 
son apples. The Chateau de Coucy is a well-known 
monument ; it is one of the most considerable ruins 
in France, and it is in some respects the most ex- 
traordinary. As you come from Laon a turn in the 



IV.] KHEIMS AND LA.ON : A LITTLE TOUR. 117 

road suddenly, at last, reveals it to you. It is still 
at a distance ; you will not reach it for half an 
hour ; but its huge white donjon stands up like some 
gigantic lighthouse at sea. Coucy is altogether on 
a grand scale, but this colossal, shining cylinder is a 
wonder of bigness. As M. Viollet-le-Duc says, it 
seems to have been built by giants for a race of 
giants. The very quaint little town of Coucy-le- 
Chateau nestles at the foot of this strange, half- 
substantial, half-spectral structure ; it was, together 
with a goodly part of the neighbouring country, the 
feudal appanage of those terrible lords who erected 
the present indestructible edifice, and whose " boast- 
ful motto " (I quote from Murray) was 

" Eoi je ne suis, 
Prince ni comte aussi ; 
Je suis le Sire de Coucy." 

Ooucy is a sleepy little borough, still girdled with 
its ancient wall, entered by its old gateways, and 
supported on the verdurous flanks of a hill-top. I 
interviewed the host of the Golden Apple in his 
kitchen ; I breakfasted — ma foi, fort bien, as they 
would say in the indigenous tongue — in his parlour ; 
and then I visited the chateau, which is at five 
minutes' walk. This very interesting ruin is the 
property of the state, and the state is represented 
by a very civil and intelligent woman, who divests 
the trade of custodian of almost all its grossness. 
Any feudal ruin is a charming affair, and Coucy has 
much of the sweet melancholy of its class. There 
are four great towers, connected by a massive curtain 
and enclosing the tremendous donjon of which I just 



118 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [iv. 

now spoke. All this is very crumbling and silvery ; 
the enclosure is a tangle of wild verdure, and the 
pigeons perch upon the inaccessible battlements ex- 
actly where the sketcher would wish them. But 
the place lacked, to my sense, the peculiar softness 
and venerableness, the ivied mellowness, of a great 
English ruin. At Coucy there is no ivy to speak 
of; the climate has not caressed and embroidered 
the rugged masses of stone. This is what I meant 
by speaking of the famous donjon as spectral ; the 
term is an odd one to apply to an edifice whose 
walls are thirty-four feet thick. Its vast, pale sur- 
face has not a speck nor a stain, not a clinging weed 
nor a creeping plant. It looks like a tower of 
ivory. 

I took my way from Coucy to the ancient town 
of Soissons, where I found another cathedral, from 
which, I think, I extracted all the entertainment it 
could legitimately yield. There is little other to 
be had at Soissons, in spite of the suggestiveness of 
its name, which is redolent of history and local 
colour. The truth is, I suppose, that Soissons looks 
so new, precisely because she is so old. She is in 
her second youth; she has renewed herself. The 
old city was worn out ; it could no longer serve ; 
it has been succeeded by another. The new one is 
a quiet, rather aristocratic-looking little ville de pro- 
vince — a collection of well- conditioned, sober-faced 
abodes of gentility, with high- walled gardens behind 
them and very carefully closed portes-cochere in 
front. Occasionally a porte - cochere opens ; an 
elderly lady in black emerges and paces discreetly 
away. An old gentleman has come to the door 



IV.] EHEIMS AND LAON : A LITTLE TOUK. 119 

with her. He is comfortably corpulent ; he wears 
gold spectacles and embroidered slippers. He looks 
up and down the dull street, and sees nothing at all ; 
then he retires, closing the porte-cochere very softly 
and firmly. But he has stood there long enough to 
give an observant stranger the impression of a 
cautious provincial bourgeoisie that has a solid for- 
tune well invested, and that marries its daughters 
only a bon escient. This latter ceremony, however, 
whenever it occurs, probably takes place in the 
cathedral, and though resting on a prosaic founda- 
tion must borrow a certain grace from that charm- 
ing building. The cathedral of Soissons has a 
statueless front and only a single tower; but it is 
full of a certain natural elegance. 



?. 

CHARTKES. 

1876. 

The spring, in Paris, since it has fairly begun, has 
been enchanting. The sun and the moon have 
been blazing in emulation, and the difference be- 
tween the blue sky of day and of night has been as 
slight as possible. There are no clouds in the sky, 
but there are little thin green clouds, little puffs 
of raw, tender verdure, entangled among the branches 
of the trees. All the world is in the streets ; 
the chairs and tables which have stood empty all 
winter before the doors of the caf^s are at a pre- 
mium ; the theatres have become intolerably close ; 
the puppet-shows in the Champs Elysees are the 
only form of dramatic entertainment which seems 
consistent with the season. By way of doing honour, 
at a small cost, to this ethereal mildness, I went 
out the other day to the ancient town of Chartres, 
where I spent several hours, which I cannot con- 
sent to pass over as if nothing had happened. It 
is the experience of the writer of these lines, who 
likes nothing so much as moving about to see the 
world, that if one has been for a longer time than 



V.] CHARTKES. 121 

usual resident and stationary, there is a kind of 
overgrown entertainment in taking the train, even 
for a suburban goal; and that if one takes it on a 
charming April day, when there is a sense, almost 
an odour, of change in the air, the innocent plea- 
sure is as nearly as possible complete. My accessi- 
bility to emotions of this kind amounts to an in- 
firmity, and the effect of it was to send me down 
to Chartres in a shamelessly optimistic state of mind. 
I was so prepared to be entertained and pleased 
with everything that it is only a mercy that the 
cathedral happens really to be a fine building. If 
it had not been, I should still have admired it in- 
ordinately, at the risk of falling into heaven knows 
what aesthetic heresy. But I am almost ashamed 
to say how soon my entertainment began. It began, 
I think, with my hailing a little open carriage on 
the Boulevard and causing myself to be driven to 
the Gare de l'Ouest — far away across the river, up 
the Eue Bonaparte, of art -student memories, and 
along the big, straight Eue de Eennes to the Boule- 
vard Montparnasse. Of course, at this rate, by the 
time I reached Chartres — the journey is of a couple 
of hours — I had almost drained the cup of pleasure. 
But it was replenished at the station, at the buffet, 
from the pungent bottle of wine I drank with my 
breakfast. Here, by the way, is another excellent 
excuse for being delighted with any day's excursion 
in France — that wherever you are, you may break- 
fast to your taste. There may, indeed, if the station 
is very small, be no buffet ; but if there is a buffet, 
you may be sure that civilisation — in the persons of 
a sympathetic young woman in a well-made black 



122 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [v. 

dress, and a rapid, zealous, grateful waiter — presides 
at it. It was quite the least, as the French say, 
that after my breakfast I should have thought the 
cathedral, as I saw it from the top of the steep hill 
on which the town stands, rising high above the 
clustered houses and seeming to make of their red- 
roofed agglomeration a mere pedestal for its im- 
mense beauty, promised remarkably well. You see 
it so as you emerge from the station, and then, as 
you climb slowly into town, you lose sight of it. 
You perceive Chartres to be a rather shabby little 
ville de province, with a few sunny, empty open 
places, and crooked shady streets, in which two or 
three times you lose your way, until at last, after 
more than once catching a glimpse, high above some 
slit between the houses, of the clear gray towers 
shining against the blue sky, you push forward 
again, risk another short cut, turn another interpos- 
ing corner, and stand before the goal of your pil- 
grimage. 

I spent a long time looking at this monument. 
I revolved around it, like a moth around a candle ; 
I went away and I came back ; I chose twenty 
different standpoints; I observed it during the 
different hours of the day, and saw it in the moon- 
light as well as the sunshine. I gained, in a Word, 
a certain sense of familiarity with it ; and yet I 
despair of giving any coherent account of it. Like 
most French cathedrals, it rises straight out of the 
street, and is destitute of that setting of turf and 
trees and deaneries and canonries which contribute 
so largely to the impressiveness of the great English 
churches. Thirty years ago a row of old houses 



v.] CHAKTRES. 123 

was glued to its base and made their back walls of 
its sculptured sides. These have been plucked 
away, and, relatively speaking, the church is fairly 
isolated. But the little square that surrounds it is 
deplorably narrow, and you flatten your back against 
the opposite houses in the vain attempt to stand off 
and survey the towers. The proper way to look at 
them would be to go up in a balloon and hang poised, 
face to face with them, in the blue air. There is, 
however, perhaps an advantage in being forced to 
stand so directly under them, for this position gives 
you an overwhelming impression of their height. I 
have seen, I suppose, churches as beautiful as this 
one, but I do not remember ever to have been so 
fascinated by superpositions and vertical effects. 
The endless upward reach of the great west front, 
the clear, silvery tone of its surface, the way three 
or four magnificent features are made to occupy its 
serene expanse, its simplicity, majesty, and dignity — 
these things crowd upon one's sense with a force 
that makes the act of vision seem for the moment 
almost all of life. The impressions produced by 
architecture lend themselves as little to interpreta- 
tion by another medium as those produced by music. 
Certainly there is an inexpressible harmony in the 
facade of Chartres. 

The doors are rather low, as those of the English 
cathedrals are apt to be, but (standing three together) 
are set in a deep framework of sculpture — rows of 
arching grooves, filled with admirable little images, 
standing with their heels on each other's heads. The 
church, as it now exists, except the northern tower, 
dates from the middle of the thirteenth century, and 



124 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [v. 

these closely-packed figures are full of the grotesque- 
ness of the period. Above the triple portals is a 
vast round-topped window, in three divisions, of the 
grandest dimensions and the stateliest effect. Above 
this window is a circular aperture, of huge circum- 
ference, with a double row of sculptured spokes 
radiating from its centre and looking on its lofty field 
of stone as expansive and symbolic as if it were 
the wheel of Time itself. Higher still is a little 
gallery with a delicate balustrade, supported on a 
beautiful cornice and stretching across the front 
from tower to tower ; and above this is a range of 
niched statues of kings — fifteen, I believe, in number. 
Above the statues is a gable, with an image of the 
Virgin and Child on its front, and another of Christ 
on its apex. In the relation of all -these parts there 
is such a high felicity that while on the one side the 
eye rests on a great many large blanks there is no 
approach on the other to poverty. The little gallery 
that I have spoken of, beneath the statues of the 
kings, had for me a peculiar charm. Useless, at its 
tremendous altitude, for other purposes, it seemed 
intended for the little images to step down and walk 
about upon. When the great facade begins to glow 
in the late afternoon light, you can imagine them 
strolling up and down their long balcony in couples, 
pausing with their elbows on the balustrade, resting 
their stony chins in their hands, and looking out, 
with their little blank eyes, on the great view of the 
old French monarchy they once ruled, and which 
now has passed away. The two great towers of the 
cathedral are among the noblest of their kind. They 
rise in solid simplicity to a height as great as the 



f.] CHARTRES. 125 

eye often troubles itself to travel, and then suddenly 
they begin to execute a magnificent series of feats 
in architectural gymnastics. This is especially true 
of the northern spire, which is a late creation, dating 
from the sixteenth century. The other is relatively 
quiet ; but its companion is a sort of tapering bou- 
quet of sculptured stone. Statues and buttresses, 
gargoyles, arabesques and crockets pile themselves 
in successive stages, until the eye loses the sense 
of everything but a sort of architectural lacework. 
The pride of Chartres, after its front, is the two 
portals of its transepts — great dusky porches, in 
three divisions, covered with more images than I 
have time to talk about. Wherever you look, along 
the sides of the church, a time-worn image is niched 
or perched. The face of each flying buttress is 
garnished with one, with the features quite melted 
away. 

The inside of the cathedral corresponds in vast- 
ness and grandeur to the outside — it is the perfection 
of gothic in its prime. But I looked at it rapidly, 
the place was so intolerably cold. It seemed to 
answer one's query of what becomes of the winter 
when the spring chases it away. The winter here- 
abouts has sought an asylum in Chartres cathedral, 
where it has found plenty of room and may reside 
in a state of excellent preservation until it can 
safely venture abroad again. I supposed I had been 
in cold churches before, but the delusion had been 
an injustice to the temperature of Chartres. The 
nave was full of the little padded chairs of the 
local bourgeoisie, whose faith, I hope for their com- 
fort, is of the good old red-hot complexion. In a 



126 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [v. 

higher temperature I should have done more justice 
to the magnificent old glass of the windows — which 
glowed through the icy dusk like the purple and 
orange of a winter sunset — and to the immense 
sculptured external casing of the choir. This latter 
is an extraordinary piece of work. It is a high gothic 
screen, shutting in the choir, and covered with ela- 
borate bas-reliefs of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries, representing scenes from the life of Christ 
and of the Virgin. Some of the figures are admir- 
able, and the effect of the whole great semicircular 
wall, chiselled like a silver bowl, is superb. There 
is also a crypt of high antiquity and, I believe, great 
interest, to be seen ; but my teeth chattered a respect- 
ful negative to the sacristan who offered to guide me 
to it. It was so agreeable to stand in the warm 
outer air again, that I spent the rest of the day in it. 
Although, besides its cathedral, Chartres has no 
very rare architectural treasures, the place is pictorial, 
in a shabby, third-rate, poverty-stricken degree, and, 
my observations were not unremunerative. There 
is a little church of Saint- Aignan, of the sixteenth 
century, with an elegant, decayed fagade, and a small 
tower beside it, lower than its own roof, to which it 
is joined, in unequal twinship, by a single long but- 
tress. Standing there with its crumbling Eenaissance 
doorway, in a kind of grass-grown alcove, it reminded 
me of certain monuments that the tourist encounters 
in small Italian towns. Most of the streets of 
Chartres are crooked lanes, winding over the face of 
the steep hill, the summit of the hill being occupied 
by half a dozen little open squares, which seem like 
reservoirs of the dulness and stillness that flow 



r.] CHARTRES. 127 

through the place. In the midst of one of them 
rises an old dirty brick obelisk, commemorating the 
glories of the young General Marceau, of the first 
Eepublic — " Soldier at 16, general at 23, he died at 
27." Such memorials, when one comes upon them 
unexpectedly, produce in the mind a series of circular 
waves of feeling, like a splash in a quiet pond. 
Chartres gives us an impression of extreme antiquity, 
but it is an antiquity that has gone down in the 
world. I saw very few of those stately little hotels, 
with pilastered fronts, which look so well in the 
silent streets of provincial towns. The houses are 
mostly low, small, and of sordid aspect, and though 
many of them have overhanging upper stories, and 
steep, battered gables, they are rather wanting in 
character. I was struck, as an American always is 
in small French and English towns, with the im- 
mense number of shops, and their brilliant appear- 
ance, which seems so out of proportion to any visible 
body of consumers. At Chartres the shopkeepers 
must all feed upon each other, for, whoever buys, 
the whole population sells. This population appeared 
to consist mainly of several hundred brown old 
peasant women, in the seventies and eighties, with 
their faces cross-hatched with wrinkles and their 
quaint white coifs drawn tightly over their weather- 
blasted eye-brows. Labour-stricken grandams, all 
the world over, are the opposite of lovely, for the 
toil that wrestles for its daily bread, morsel by 
morsel, is not beautifying; but I thought I had 
never seen the possibilities of female ugliness so 
variously embodied as in the crones of Chartres. 
Some of them were leading small children by the 



128 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [v. 

hand — little red-cheeked girls, in the close black 
caps and black pinafores of humble French infancy — 
a costume which makes French children always look 
like orphans. Others were guiding along the flinty 
lanes the steps of small donkeys, some of them 
fastened into little carts, some with well-laden backs. 
These were the only quadrupeds I perceived at 
Chartres. Neither horse nor carriage did I behold, 
save at the station the omnibuses of the rival inns — 
the " Grand Monarque " and the " Due de Chartres" 
— which glare at each other across the Grande 
Place. A friend of mine told me that a few years 
ago, passing through Chartres, he went by night to 
call upon a gentleman who lived there. During his 
visit it came on to rain violently, and when the hour 
for his departure arrived the rain had made the 
streets impassable. There was no vehicle to be had, 
and my friend was resigning himself to a soaking. 
"You can be taken of course in the sedan-chair," 
said his host with dignity. The sedan-chair was, 
produced, a couple of serving -men grasped the 
handles, my friend stepped into it, and went swing- 
ing back — -through the last century — to the " Grand 
Monarque." This little anecdote, I imagine, still 
paints Chartres socially. 

Before dinner I took a walk on the planted 
promenade which encircles the town — the Tour-de- 
ville it is called — much of which is extremely pic- 
turesque. Chartres has lost her walls as a whole, 
but here and there they survive, and play a desultory 
part in holding the town together. In one place the 
rampart is really magnificent — smooth, strong and 
lofty, curtained with ivy, and supporting on its 



v.] CHARTRES. 129 

summit an old convent and its garden. Only one 
of the city -gates remains — a narrow arch of the 
fourteenth century, flanked by two admirable round 
towers, and preceded by a fosse. If you stoop a 
little, as you stand outside, the arch of this hoary 
old gate makes a capital setting for the picture of 
the interior of the town, and, on the inner hill-top, 
against the sky, the large gray mass of the cathedral. 
The ditch is full, and to right and to left it flows 
along the base of the mouldering wall, through 
which the shabby backs of houses extrude, and 
which is garnished with little wooden galleries, 
lavatories of the town's soiled linen. These little 
galleries are filled with washerwomen, who crane 
over and dip their many- coloured rags into the 
yellow stream. The old patched and interrupted 
wall, the ditch with its weedy edges, the spots of 
colour, the white-capped laundresses in their little 
wooden cages — one lingers to look at it all. 



VL 

ROUEN. 

1876. 

It is quite in the nature of things that a Parisian 
correspondence should have flagged during the last 
few weeks ; for even the most brilliant of capitals, 
when the summer has fairly begun to be summer, 
affords few topics to the chronicler. To a chronicle 
of small beer such a correspondence almost literally 
finds itself reduced. The correspondent consumes a 
goodly number of those magnified thimblefuls of this 
fluid, known in Paris as "bocks," and from the 
shadiest corner of the coolest cafe" he can discover 
watches the softened bitumen grow more largely 
interspaced. There is little to do or to see, and there- 
fore little to write about. There is in fact only one 
thing to do, namely, to get out of Paris. The lively 
imagination of the correspondent anticipates his 
departure and takes flight to one of the innumerable 
watering-places whose charms at this season are set 
forth in large yellow and pink placards on all the 
empty walls. They order this matter, like so many 
others, much better in France. Here you have not, 
as in America, to hunt up the "summer retreat" 



vi.] ROUEN. 131 

about which you desire information in a dense alpha- 
betical list in the columns of a newspaper ; you are 
familiar with its merits for weeks before you start 
■ — you have seen them half a dozen times a day 
emblazoned on the line of your customary walk, over 
the hand- and seal of the company that runs, as we 
should say in America, the Casino. If you are de- 
tained in Paris, however, after luckier mortals have 
departed — your reflections upon the fate of the luck- 
less mortals who do not depart at all are quite another 
question, demanding another chapter — it does not 
perhaps make you much happier to peruse these 
lyrical advertisements, which seem to nutter with 
the breezes of Houlgate and Etretat. You must take 
your consolation where you can find it, and it must 
be added that of all great cities Paris is the most 
tolerable in hot weather. It is true that the asphalt 
liquifies, and it is true that the brilliant limestone 
of which the city is built reflects the sun with un- 
comfortable fierceness. It is also true that of a 
summer evening you pay a penalty for living in the 
best -lighted capital in the world. The inordinate 
amount of gas in the streets makes the atmosphere 
hot and thick, so that even under the dim constel- 
lations you feel of a July night as if you were in a 
big music-hall. If you look down at such a time 
upon the central portions of Paris from a high window 
in a remoter quarter, you see them wrapped in a lurid 
haze, of the devil's own brewing. But, on the other 
hand, there are a hundred facilities for remaining out 
of doors. You are not obliged to sit on a " stoop " 
or on a curb-stone, as in New- York. The Boulevards 
are a long chain of caf^s, each one with its little 



132 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [vi. 

promontory of chairs and tables projecting into the 
sea of asphalt. These promontories are doubtless not 
exactly islands of the blessed, peopled though some 
of them may be with sirens addicted to beer, but 
they may help you to pass a hot evening. Then you 
may dine in the Champs Elys6"es, at a table spread 
under the trees, beside an ivied wall, and almost 
believe you are in the country. This illusion, im- 
perfect as it is, is a luxury, and must be paid for 
accordingly ; the dinner is not so good as at a restau- 
rant on the Boulevard, and is considerably dearer, 
and there is after all not much difference in sitting 
with one's feet in dusty gravel or on a sanded floor. 
But the whole situation is more idyllic. I indulged 
in a cheap idyl the other day by taking the penny 
steamer down the Seine to Auteuil (a very short sail), 
and dining at what is called in Parisian parlance a 
guingette on the bank of the stream. It was a very 
humble style of entertainment, but the most ambi- 
tious pursuit of pleasure can do no more than succeed, 
and this was a success. The Seine at Auteuil is wide, 
and is spanned by a stately viaduct of two tiers of 
arches, which stands up against the sky in a pic- 
turesque and monumental manner. Your table is 
spread under a trellis which scratches your head — 
spread chiefly with fried fish — and an old man who 
looks like a political exile comes and stands before 
it and sings a doleful ditty on the respect due to 
white hairs. You testify by the bestowal of copper 
coin the esteem with which his own inspire you, and 
he is speedily replaced by a lad with one arm, who 
treats you to something livelier : 

"A la bonne heure ; parlez-moi de §a !" 



VI.] ftOUEN. 133 

You eventually return to Paris on the top of a tram- 
car. It is a very different affair to go out and dine 
at the Bois de Boulogne, at the charming restaurant 
which is near the cascade and the Longchamp race- 
course. Here are no ballad-singers, but stately trees 
majestically grouped and making long evening sha- 
dows on a lawn, and irreproachable tables, and car- 
riages rolling up behind high -stepping horses and 
depositing all sorts of ladies. The drive back through 
the wood at night is most charming, and the coolness 
of the air extreme, however hot you may still be 
certain to find the city. 

The best thing, therefore, is not to go back. I 
write these lines at an inn at Havre, before a window 
which frames the picture of the seaward path of the 
transatlantic steamers. One of the great black ships 
is at this moment painted on the canvas, very near, 
and beginning its outward journey. I watch it to 
the right-hand ledge of the window, which is as far 
as so poor a sailor need be expected to follow it. The 
hotel at Havre is called, for mysterious reasons, 
* Frascati " — reasons which I give up the attempt to 
fathom, so undiscoverable are its points of analogy 
with the lovely village of the same name which nestles 
among the olives of the Eoman hills. The locality 
has its charms, however. It is very agreeable, for 
instance, at the end of a hot journey, to sit down to 
dinner in a great open cage, hung over the Atlantic., 
and, while the sea-breeze cools your wine, watch the 
swiftly-moving ships pass before you like the figures 
on the field of a magic lantern. It is pleasant also 
to open your eyes in the early dawn, before the light 
is intense, and without moviug your head on the 



134 POETEAITS OF PLAGES. [vi. 

pillow, enjoy the same clear vision of the ocean high- 
way. In the vague dusk, with their rapid gliding, 
the passing vessels look like the ghosts of wrecked 
ships. Most seaports are picturesque, and Havre is 
not the least so ; but my enjoyment has been not of 
my goal, but of my journey. 

My head is full of the twenty-four hours I have 
just passed at Eouen, and of the charming sail down 
the Seine to Honfleur. Eouen is a city of very 
ancient renown, and yet I confess I was not prepared 
to find a little town of so much expression. The 
traveller who treads the Eouen streets at the pre- 
sent day sees but the shadow of their former cha- 
racteristics ; for the besom of M. Haussmann has 
swept through the city, and a train of " embellish- 
ments " has followed in its track. The streets have 
been widened and straightened, and the old houses 
- — gems of mediaeval domestic architecture — which 
formed the peculiar treasure of the place, have been 
more than decimated. A great deal remains, how- 
ever, and American eyes are quick to make discov- 
eries. The cathedral, the churches, the Palais de 
Justice, are alone a splendid group of monuments, 
and a stroll through the streets reveals a collection of 
brown and sculptured facades, of quaintly-timbered 
gables, of curious turrets and casements, of door- 
ways which still may be called rich. Every now 
and then a considerable stretch of duskiness and 
crookedness delights the sentimental tourist who is 
to pass but a couple of nights at Eouen, and who 
does not care if his favourite adjective happen to 
imply another element which also is spelled with a 
p. It is nothing to him that the picturesque is 



VI.] ROUEN. 135 

pestiferous. It is everything to him that the great 
front of the cathedral is magnificently battered, 
heavy, impressive. It has been defaced immensely, 
and is now hardly more than a collection of empty 
niches. I do not mean, of course, that the wanton 
tourist rejoices in the absence of the statues which 
once filled them, but up to the present moment, at 
least, he is not sorry that the fagade has not been 
restored. It consists of a sort of screen, pierced in 
the centre with a huge wheel- window, crowned with 
a pyramid of chiselled needles and spires, flanked 
with two turrets capped with tall empty canopies, 
and covered, generally, with sculptures — friezes, 
statues, excrescences. On each side of it rises a 
great tower; one a rugged mass of early Norman 
work, with little ornament save its hatcheted closed 
arches, and its great naked base, as huge and white 
as the bottom of a chalk-cliff; the other a specimen 
of sixteenth century gothic, extremely flamboyant 
and confounding to the eye. The sides of the 
cathedral are as yet more or less imbedded in cer- 
tain black and dwarfish old houses, but if you pass 
around them by a long detour, you arrive at two 
superb lateral porches. The so-called Portail des 
Libraires, in especial, on the northern side, is a 
magnificent affair, sculptured from summit to base 
(it is now restored), and preceded by a long fore- 
court, in which the guild of booksellers used to hold 
its musty traffic. From here you see the immense 
central tower, perched above the junction of the 
transepts and the nave, and crowned with a gigantic 
iron spire, lately erected to replace one which was 
destroyed by lightning in the early part of the cen- 



136 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [vi. 

tury. This gaunt pyramid has the drawback, to 
American eyes, of resembling too much the tall fire- 
towers which are seen in transatlantic cities, and its 
dimensions are such that, viewed from a distance, it 
fairly makes little Eouen look top-heavy. Behind 
the choir, within, is a beautiful lady-chapel, and in 
this chapel are two enchanting works of art. The 
larger and more striking of these is the tomb of the 
two Cardinals d'Amboise, uncle and nephew — the 
elder, if I mistake not, minister of Louis XII. It 
consists of a shallow, oblong recess in the wall, lined 
with gilded and fretted marble, and corniced with 
delicate little statues. Within the recess the figures 
of the two cardinals are kneeling, with folded hands 
and ruggedly earnest faces, their long robes spread 
out behind them with magnificent amplitude. They 
are full of life, dignity, and piety ; they look like 
portraits of Holbein transferred into marble. ,The 
base of the monument is composed of a series of 
admirable little images representing the cardinal and 
other virtues, and the effect of the whole work is 
wonderfully grave and rich. The discreet traveller 
will never miss an opportunity to come into a great 
church at eventide — the hour when his fellow- 
travellers, less discreet, are lingering over the table 
d'hote, when the painted windows glow with a 
deeper splendour, when the long wand of the 
beadle, slowly tapping the pavement, or the shuffle 
of the old sacristan, has a ghostly resonance along 
the empty nave, and three or four work-weary 
women, before a dusky chapel, are mumbling for the 
remission of unimaginable sins. At this hour, at 
Souen, the tomb of the Duke of Br£ze, husband of 
Diana of Poitiers, placed opposite to the monument 



VI.] ROUEN. 137 

I have just described, seemed to me the most beauti- 
ful thing in the world. It is presumably the work 
of the delightful Jean Goujon, and it bears the 
stamp of his graceful and inventive talent. The 
deceased is lying on his back, almost naked, with a 
part of his shroud bound in a knot about his head — 
a realistic but not a repulsive image of death. At 
Ins head kneels the amiable Diana, in sober gar- 
ments, all decency and devotion ; at his feet stands 
the Virgin, a charming young woman with a charm- 
ing child. Above, on another tier, the subject of 
the monument is represented in the fulness of life, 
dressed as for a tournament, bestriding a high-step- 
ing war-horse, riding forth like a Roland or a 
Galahad. The architecture of the tomb is exceed- 
ingly graceful and the subordinate figures admirable, 
but the image of the dead Duke is altogether a 
masterpiece. The other evening, in the solemn 
stillness and the fading light of the great cathedral, 
it seemed irresistibly human and touching. The 
spectator felt a sort of impulse to smooth out the 
shroud and straighten the helpless hands. 

The second church of Eouen, Saint -Ouen, the 
beautiful and harmonious, has no monuments of this 
value, but it offers within a higher interest than the 
Cathedral. Without, it looks like an English abbey, 
scraped and restored, disencumbered of huddling 
neighbours and surrounded on three sides by a beauti- 
ful garden. Seen to this excellent advantage it is 
one of the noblest of churches ; but within, it is one 
of the most fascinating. My taste in architecture 
greatly resembles my opinions in fruit ; the particu- 
lar melon or pear or peach that I am eating appears 
to me to place either peaches, pears, or melons, 



138 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [vi. ' 

beyond all other succulent things. In the same 
way, in a fine building the present impression is the 
one that convinces me most. This is deplorable 
levity ; yet I risk the affirmation in propos of Saint- 
Ouen. I can imagine no happier combination of 
lightness and majesty. Its proportions bring tears 
to the eyes. I have left myself space only to 
recommend the sail down the Seine from Eouen to 
the mouth of the stream; but I recommend it in 
the highest terms. The heat was extreme and the 
little steamer most primitive, but the river is as 
entertaining as one could wish. It makes an infinite 
number of bends and corners and angles, rounded 
off by a charming vegetation. Abrupt and rocky 
hills go with it all the way — hills with cornfields 
lying in their hollows and deep woods crowning 
their tops. Out of the woodland peep old manors, 
and beneath, between the hills and the stream, are 
high-thatched farmsteads, lying deep in their meadows 
and orchards, cottages pallisaded with hollyhocks; 
gray old Norman churches and villas flanked with 
big horse-chestnuts. It is a land of peace and 
plenty, and remarkable to Anglo-Saxon eyes for the 
English-looking details of its scenery. I noticed a 
hundred places where one might have been in Kent 
as well as in Normandy. In fact it is almost better 
than Kent, for Kent has no Seine. At the last the 
river becomes unmistakably an arm of the sea, and 
as a river, therefore, less interesting. But crooked 
little Honfleur, with its miniature port, clinging to 
the side of a cliff as luxuriant as one of the head- 
lands of the Mediterranean, gratifies in a high degree 
the tourist with a propensity for sketching. 



VIL 

ETKETAT. 

1876. 

The coast of Normandy and Picardy, from Trouville 
to Boulogne, is a chain of stations balnSaires, each 
with its particular claim to patronage. The grounds 
of the claim are in some cases not especially obvious ; 
but they are generally found to reside in the fact 
that if one's spirits, on arriving, are low, so also are 
the prices. There are the places that are dear and 
brilliant, like Trouville and Dieppe, and places that 
are cheap and dreary, like Fecamp and Cabourg. 
Then there are the places that are both cheap and 
pleasant. This delightful combination of qualities 
may be found at the modest plage from which I write 
these lines. At Etretat you may enjoy some of the 
finest cliff-scenery it has been my fortune to behold, 
and you may breakfast and dine at the principal 
hotel for the sum of five and a half francs a day. 
You may engage a room in the town over the 
butcher's, the baker's, the cobbler's, at a rate that 
will depend upon your talent for driving a bargain, 
but that in no case will be exorbitant. Add to this 
that there are no other opportunities at Etretat to 



140 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [VII. 

spend money. You wear old clothes, you walk about 
in canvas shoes, you deck your head with a fisher- 
man's cap (when made of white flannel these articles 
may be extolled for their coolness, convenience, and 
picturesqueness), you lie on the pebbly strand most 
of the day, watching the cliffs, the waves, and the 
bathers; in the evening you converse with your 
acquaintance on the terrace of the Casino, and you 
keep monkish hours. Though Etretat enjoys great 
and deserved popularity, I see no symptoms of the 
decline of these simple fashions — no menace of the 
invasion of luxury. A little more luxury, indeed, 
might be imported without doing any harm ; though 
after all we soon learn that it is an idle enough pre- 
judice that has hitherto prevented us from keeping 
our soap in a sugar-dish and regarding a small rock, 
placed against a door, as an efficient substitute for a 
key. From a Parisian point of view, Etretat is cer- 
tainly primitive, but it would be affectation on the 
part of an American to pretend that he was nofr 
agreeably surprised to find a "summer resort," in 
which he had been warned that he would have to 
rough it, so elaborately appointed and organised. 
Etretat may be primitive, but Etretat is French, and 
therefore Etretat is " administered." 

Like most of the French watering-places, the 
place has a limited past. Twenty years ago it was 
but a cluster of fishing-huts. A group of artists and 
literary people were its first colonists, and Alphonse 
Karr became the mouthpiece of their enthusiasm. In 
vulgar phrase, he wrote up Etretat, and he lives in 
legend, at the present hour, as the genius loci. The 
main street is named after him ; the gable of the 



vii.] ETEETAT. 141 

chief inn — the classic Hotel Blanquet — is adorned 
with a coloured medallion representing his cropped 
head and long beard ; the shops are stocked with his 
photographs and with pictures of his villa. Like 
the magician who has evoked the spirit, he has made 
his bow and retired ; but the artistic fraternity, his 
disciples, still haunt the place, and it enjoys also the 
favour of theatrical people, three or four of whom, 
having retired upon their laurels, possess villas here. 
From my open window, as I write these lines, I look 
out beyond a little cluster of clean housetops at the 
long green flank of the down, as it slopes to the 
village from the summit of the cliff. To the right 
is the top of an old storm-twisted grove of oaks, in 
the heart of which stands a brown old farmhouse ; 
then comes the sharp, even outline of the down, with 
its side spotted with little flat bushes and wrinkled 
with winding paths, along which here and there I 
see a bright figure moving ; on the left, above the 
edge of the cliff, stands a bleak little chapel, dedi- 
cated to our Lady of the fishing-folk. Just here a 
provoking chimney starts up and cuts off my view 
of the downward plunge of the cliff, showing me, 
with a bar of blue ocean beyond, but a glimpse of 
its white cheek — its fantastic profile is to the left. 
But there is not far to go to see without impedi- 
ments. Three minutes' walk along the Eue Alphonse 
Karr, where every house is a shop, and every shop 
has lodgers above it, who scramble bedward by a 
ladder and trap-door, brings you to the little pebbly 
bay where the cliffs are perpendicular and the foreign 
life of Etretat goes forward. At one end are the 
small fishing-smacks, with their green sides and their 



142 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [vu, 

black sails, resting crookedly upon the stones ; at the 
other is the Casino, and the two or three tiers of 
bathing-houses on the slope of the beach in front of 
it. This beach may he said to be Etretat. It is so 
steep and stony as to make circulation impossible ; 
one's only course is to plant a camp-chair among the 
stones or to look for a soft spot in the pebbles, and 
to abide in the position so chosen. And yet it is the 
spot in Etretat most sacred to tranquil pleasure. 

The French do not treat their beaches as we do 
ours — as places for a glance, a dip, or a trot, places 
animated simply during the balneary hours, and 
wrapped in natural desolation for the rest of the 
twenty-four. They love them, they adore them, they 
take possession of them, they live upon them. The 
people here sit upon the beach from morning to night ; 
whole families come early and establish themselves, 
with umbrellas and rugs, books and work. The 
ladies get sunburnt and don't mind it; the gentle- 
men smoke interminably; the children roll over on 
the pointed pebbles and stare at the sun like young 
eagles. (The children's lot I rather commiserate; 
they have no wooden spades and pails ; they have 
no sand to delve and grub in; they can dig no 
trenches and canals, nor see the creeping tide flood 
them.) The great occupation and amusement is the 
bathing, which has many entertaining features (I 
allude to it as a spectacle), especially for strangers 
who keep an eye upon national idiosyncrasies. The 
French take their bathing very seriously; supple- 
mented by opera-bouffe in the evening at the Casino, 
it is their most preferred form of communion with 
nature. The spectators and the bathers commingle 



vii.] ETKETAT. 143 

in graceful promiscuity ; it is the freedom of the 
golden age. The whole beach becomes a large 
family party, in which the sweetest familiarities 
prevail. There is more or less costume, but the 
minimum rather than the maximum is found the 
more comfortable. Bathers come out of their dress- 
ing-houses wrapped in short white sheets, which they 
deposit on the stones, taking an air-bath for some 
minutes before entering the water. Like everything 
in France, the bathing is excellently managed, and 
you feel the firm hand of a paternal and overlooking 
government the moment you issue from your hut. 
The Government will on no consideration consent to 
your being rash. There are six or eight worthy old 
sons of Neptune on the beach — perfect amphibious 
creatures — who, if you are a new-comer, immediately 
accost you and demand pledges that you know how 
to swim. If you do not, they give you much ex- 
cellent advice, and keep an eye on you while you 
are in the water. They are moreover obliged to 
render you any service you may demand — to pour 
buckets of water over your head, to fetch your bath- 
ing-sheet and your slippers, to carry your wife and 
children into the sea, to dip them, cheer them, sustain 
them, to teach them how to swim and how to dive, 
to hover about, in short, like ministering and trickling 
angels. At a short distance from the shore are two 
boats, freighted with sundry other marine divinities, 
who remain there perpetually, taking it as a personal 
offence if you venture out too far. 

The French themselves have every pretext for 
venturing, being in general excellent swimmers. 
Every one swims, and swims indefatigably — men, 



144 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [VII. 

women, and children, I have been especially struck 
with the prowess of the ladies, who take the neatest 
possible headers from the two long plunging-boards 
which are rigged in the water upon high wheels. 
As you recline upon the beach you may observe 
Mademoiselle X. issue from her cabin — Mademoi- 
selle X., the actress of the Palais Eoyal Theatre, 
whom you have seen and applauded behind the 
footlights. She wears a bathing-dress in which, as 
regards the trousers, even what I have called the 
minimum has been appreciably scanted ; but she 
trips down, surveying her liberated limbs. " C'est 
convenable, fespire, hein ?" says Mademoiselle, and 
trots up the spring-board which projects over the 
waves with one end uppermost, like a great see-saw. 
She balances a moment, and then gives a great aerial 
dive, executing on the way the most graceful of 
somersaults. This performance the star of the 
Palais Eoyal repeats during the ensuing hour, at 
intervals of five minutes, and leaves you, as you lie 
tossing little stones into the water, to consider the 
curious and delicate question why a lady may go so 
far as to put herself into a single scant clinging 
garment and take a straight leap, head downward, 
before three hundred spectators, without violation of 
propriety — and why impropriety should begin only 
when she turns over in the air in such a way that 
for five seconds her head is upwards. The logic of 
the matter is mysterious ; white and black are 
divided by a hair. But the fact remains that virtue 
is on one side of the hair and vice on the other. 
There are some days here so still and radiant, how- 
ever, that it seems as if vice itself, steeped in such 



vii.] ETRETAT. 145 

an air and such a sea, might be diluted into inno- 
cence. The sea is as blue as melted sapphires, and 
the rugged white faces of the bordering cliffs make 
a silver frame for the picture. Every one is idle, 
amused, good-natured ; the bathers take to the water 
as easily .as mermen and mermaids. The bathing- 
men in the two hateaux de surveillance have in their 
charge a freight of rosy children, more or less chub- 
bily naked, and they have nailed a gay streamer and 
a rude nosegay to their low mastheads. The swim- 
mers dip and rise, circling round the boats and play- 
ing with the children. Every now and then they 
grasp the sides of the boats and cling to them in a 
dozen harmonious attitudes, making one fancy that 
Eugene Delacroix's great picture of Dante and Virgil 
on the Styx, with the damned trying to scramble 
into Charon's bark, has been repainted as a scene 
on one of the streams of Paradise. The swimmers 
are not the damned, but the blessed, and the demon- 
strative French babies are the cherubs. 

The Casino at Etretat is a modest but respectable 
establishment, with a sufficiently capacious terrace, 
directly upon the beach, a cafe\ a billiard-room, a 
ballroom — which may also be used as a theatre, a 
reading-room, and a salon de conversation. It is in 
very good taste, without any attempt at gilding or 
mirrors ; the ballroom, in fact, is quite a master- 
piece, with its charm of effect produced simply by 
unpainted woods and happy proportions. Three 
evenings in the week a blond young man in a white 
necktie plays waltzes on a grand piano ; but the 
effect is not that of an American " hop," owing to 
the young ladies of France not being permitted to 

L 



146 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [vn. 

dance in public places. They may only sit wistfully 
beside their mammas. Imagine a "hop" at which 
sweet seventeen is condemned to immobility. The 
burden of the gaiety is sustained by three or four 
rosy English maidens and as many of their Ameri- 
can sisters. On the other evenings a weak little 
operatic troupe gives light specimens of the lyric 
drama, the privilege of enjoying which is covered 
by your subscription to the Casino. The French 
hurry in joyously (four times a week in July and 
August !) at the sound of the bell, but I can give 
no report of the performances. Sometimes I look 
through the lighted windows and see, on the dimin- 
utive stage, a short-skirted young woman with one 
hand on her heart and the other persuasively ex- 
tended. Through the hot unpleasant air comes a 
little ghost of a roulade. I turn away and walk on 
the terrace and listen to the ocean vocalising to the 
stars. 

But there are (by daylight) other walks at Etretat 
than the terrace, and no account of the place is com- 
plete without some commemoration of the admirable 
cliffs. They are the finest I have seen ; their fan- 
tastic needles and buttresses, at either end of the 
little bay, give to careless Etretat an extreme dis- 
tinction. In spite of there being no sands, a per- 
sistent admirer of nature will walk a long distance 
upon the tiresome sea-margin of pebbles for the sake 
of being under them and visiting some of their quiet 
caves and embrowned recesses, varnished by the 
ocean into splendid tones. Seen in this way from 
directly below, they look stupendous ; they hold up 
their heads with attitudes quite Alpine. They are 






VII.] ETEETAT. 147 

marvellously white and straight and smooth ; they 
have the tint and something of the surface of time- 
yellowed marble, and here and there, -at their sum- 
mits, they break into quaint little pinnacles and 
turrets. But to be on the top of them is even 
better ; here you may walk over miles of grassy, 
breezy down, with the woods, contorted and sea- 
stunted, of old farmsteads on your land-side (the 
farmhouses here have all a charming way of being 
buried in a wood, like the castle of the Sleeping 
Beauty), coming every little while upon a weather- 
blackened old shepherd and his flock (their conver- 
sation — the shepherds' — is delightful), or on some 
little seaward-plunging valley, holding in its green 
hollow a diminutive agricultural village, curtained 
round from the sea- winds by a dense stockade of 
trees. So you may go southward or northward, 
without impediment, to Havre or to Dieppe. 



VIII. 

FEOM NOKMANDY TO THE PYEENEES. 

1876. 

The other day, before the first fire of winter, when 
the deepening dusk had compelled me to close my 
book and wheel my chair closer, I indulged in a 
retrospect. The objects of it were not far distant, 
and yet they were already interfused with the mellow 
tints of the past. In the crackling flame the last 
remnant of the summer appeared to shrink up and 
vanish. But the flicker of its destruction made a x 
sort of fantastic imagery, and in the midst of the 
winter fire the summer sunshine seemed to glow. 
It lit up a series of visible memories. 



One of the first was that of a perfect day on the 
coast of Normandy — a warm, still Sunday in the 
early part of August. From my pillow, on waking, 
I could look at a strip of blue sea and a great cube 
of white cliff. I observed that the sea had never 
been so brilliant, and that the cliff was shining as if 
it had been painted in the night. I rose and came 



VIII.] FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 149 

forth with the sense that it was the finest day of 
summer, and that one ought to do something uncom- 
mon by way of keeping it. At Etretat it was un- 
common to take a walk ; the custom of the country 
is to lie all day upon the pebbly strand, watching, 
as we should say in America, one's fellow-boarders. 
Your leisurely stroll, in a scanty sheet, from your 
bathing-cabin into the water, and your trickling pro- 
gress from the water back into your cabin, form, as a 
general thing, the sum total of your pedestrianism. 
For the rest you remain horizontal, contemplating 
the horizon. To mark the day with a white stone, 
therefore, it was quite sufficient to stretch my legs. 
So I climbed the huge grassy cliff which shuts in 
the little bay on the right (as you lie on the beach, 
head upward), and gained the bleak white chapel of 
Notre Dame de la Garde, which a lady told me she 
was sure was the original of Matthew Arnold's 
"little gray church on the windy shore." This is 
very likely; but the little church to-day was not 
gray, neither was the shore windy. 

I had occasion, by the time I reached the sum- 
mit, to wish it had been. Deep, silent sunshine 
filled the air, and the long grass of the downs stood 
up in the light without a tremor. The downs at 
Etretat are magnificent, and the way they stretched 
-off toward Dieppe, with their shining levels and their 
faintly-shaded dells, was in itself an irresistible in- 
vitation. On the land-side they have been some- 
what narrowed by cultivation ; the woods, and farms, 
and grain-fields here and there creep close enough to 
the edge of the cliff almost to see the shifting of the 
tides at its base. But cultivation in Normandy is 



150 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [viri. 

itself picturesque, and the pedestrian rarely need re- 
sent its encroachments. Neither walls nor hedges 
nor fences are anywhere visible ; the whole land lies 
open to the breezes and to his curious footsteps. 
This universal absence of barriers gives an air of 
vastness to the landscape, so that really, in a little 
French province, you have more of the feeling of 
being in a big country than on our own huge conti- 
nent, which bristles so incongruously with defensive 
palings and dykes. Norman farmhouses, too, with 
their mossy roofs and their visible beams making all 
kinds of triangles upon the ancient plaster of their 
walls, are very delightful things. Hereabouts they 
have always a dark little wood close beside them ; 
often a chSnaie, as the term is — a fantastic little 
grove of tempest-tossed oaks. The trees look as if, 
some night, when the sea-blasts were howling their 
loudest and their boughs were tossing most wildly, 
the tumult had suddenly been stilled and they had 
stopped short, each in the attitude into which the x 
storm was twisting it. The only thing the storm 
can do with them now is to blow them straight. 
The long, indented coast-line had never seemed to 
me so charming. It stretched away into the light 
haze of the horizon, with such lovely violet spots in 
its caves and hollows, and such soft white gleams on 
its short headlands — such exquisite gradations of 
distance and such capricious interruptions of per- 
spective — that one could only say that the land was 
really trying to smile as intensely as the sea. The 
smile of the sea was a positive simper. Such a 
glittering and twinkling, such a softness and blue- 
ness, such tiny little pin-points of foam, and such 



VIII.] FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 151 

delicate little wrinkles of waves — all this made the 
ocean look like a flattered portrait. 

The day I speak of was a Sunday, and there were 
to be races at Fecamp, ten miles away. The agreeable 
thing was, of course, to walk to Fecamp over the grassy 
downs. I- walked and walked, over the levels and the 
dells, having land and ocean quite to myself. Here and 
there I met a shepherd lying flat on his stomach in 
the sun, while his sheep, in extreme dishabille 
(shearing- time being recent), went huddling in front 
of me as I approached. Far below, on the blue 
ocean, like a fly on a table of lapis, crawled a little 
steamer, carrying people from Etretat to the races. 
I seemed to go much faster, yet the steamer got to 
Fecamp before me. But I stopped to gossip with a 
shepherd on a grassy hillside, and to admire certain 
little villages which are niched in small, transverse, 
seaward-sloping valleys. The shepherd told me that 
he had been farm-servant to the same master for 
five-and- thirty years — ever since the age of ten; and 
that for thirty-five summers he had fed his flock upon 
those downs. I don't know whether his sheep were 
tired of their diet, but he professed himself very tired of 
his life. I remarked that in fine weather it must be 
charming, and he observed, with humility, that to thirty- 
five summers there went a certain number of rainy days. 

The walk to Fecamp would be quite satisfactory 
if it were not for the fonds. The fonds are the 
transverse valleys just mentioned — the channels, for 
the most part, of small water-courses which discharge 
themselves into the sea. The downs subside, pre- 
cipitately, to the level of the beach, and then slowly 
lift their grassy shoulders on the other side of the 



152 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [vin. 

gully. As the cliffs are of immense height, these 
indentations are profound, and drain off a little of 
the exhilaration of the too elastic pedestrian. The 
first fond strikes him as delightfully picturesque, 
and he is down the long slope on one side and up 
the gigantic hump on the other before he has time to 
feel hot. But the second is greeted with that tem- 
pered empressement with which you bow in the street 
to an acquaintance whom you have met half an hour 
before ; the third is a stale repetition ; the fourth is 
decidedly one too many, and the fifth is sensibly 
exasperating. The fonds, in a word, are very tire- 
some. It was, if I remember rightly, in the bottom 
of the last and widest of the series that I discovered 
the little town of Yport. Every little fishing- village 
on the Norman coast has, within the last ten years, 
set up in business as a watering-place; and, though 
one might fancy that nature had condemned Yport 
to modest obscurity, it is plain she has no idea of 
being out of the fashion. But she is a miniature, 
imitation of her rivals. She has a meagre little 
wood behind her and an evil-smelling beach, on 
which bathing is possible only at the highest tide. 
At the scorching midday hour at which I inspected 
her she seemed absolutely empty, and the ocean, 
beyond acres of slippery seaweed, looked very far 
away. She has everything that a properly appointed 
station de bains should have, but everything is on a 
Lilliputian scale. The whole place looked like a 
huge ISTuremburg toy. There is a diminutive hotel, 
in which, properly, the head -waiter should be a 
pigmy and the chambermaid a sprite, and beside it 
there is a Casino on the smallest possible scale. 



vin.] FKOM NOKMANDY TO THE PYKENEES. 153 

Everything about the Casino is so consistently 
microscopic, that it seems a matter of course that 
the newspapers in the reading-room should be printed 
in the very finest type. Of course there is a reading- 
room, and a dancing-room, and a cafe\ and a billiard- 
room, with a bagatelle-board instead of a table, and 
a little terrace on which you may walk up and 
down with very short steps. I hope the prices are 
as tiny as everything else, and I suspect, indeed, 
that Yport honestly claims, not that she is attractive, 
but that she is cheap. 

I toiled up the perpendicular cliff again, and took 
my way over the grass, for another hour, to Fecamp, 
where I found the peculiarities of Yport directly 
reversed. The place is a huge, straggling village, 
seated along a wide, shallow bay, and adorned, of 
course, with the classic Casino and the row of hotels. 
But all this is on a very brave scale, though it is 
not manifest that the bravery at Fecamp has won a 
victory; and, indeed, the local attractions did not 
strike me as irresistible. A pebbly beach of im- 
mense length, fenced off from the town by a grassy 
embankment ; a Casino of a bald and unsociable 
aspect ; a principal inn, with an interminable brown 
facade, suggestive somehow of an asylum or an 
almshouse — such are the most striking features of 
this particular watering-place. There are magni- 
ficent cliffs on each side of the bay, but, as the 
French say, without impropriety, it is the devil to 
get to them. There was no one in the hotel, in the 
Casino, or on the beach ; the whole town being in 
the act of climbing the farther cliff, to reach the 
downs on which the races were to be held. The 



154 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [vnr. 

green hillside was black with trudging spectators 
and the long sky-line was fretted with them. When 
I say there was no one at the inn, I forget the 
gentleman at the door, who informed me positively 
that he would give me no breakfast ; he seemed to 
have stayed at home from the races expressly to give 
himself this pleasure. But I went farther and fared 
better, obtaining a meal of homely succulence in an 
unfashionable tavern, in a back street, where the 
wine was sound, the cutlets were tender, and the 
serving-maid was rosy. Then I walked along — 
for a mile, it seemed — through a dreary, gray grand'- 
rue, where the sunshine was hot, the odours were 
portentous, and the doorsteps garnished with aged 
fishwives, retired from business, whose plaited linen 
coifs gave a value, as the painters say, to the brown 
umber of their cheeks. I inspected the harbour 
and its goodly basin — with nothing in it — and 
certain pink and blue houses which surround it, and 
then, joining the last stragglers, I clambered up the 
side of the cliff to the downs. 

The races had already begun, and the ring of 
spectators was dense. I picked out some of the 
smallest people, looked over their heads, and saw 
several young farmers, in parti-coloured jackets and 
very red in the face, bouncing up and down on 
handsome cart-horses. Satiated at last with this 
diversion, I turned away and wandered down the 
hill again ; and after strolling through the streets of 
Fecamp, and gathering not a little of the wayside 
entertainment that a seaport and fishing-town always 
yields, I repaired to the Abbey-church, a monument 
of some importance, and almost as great an object 



VIII.] FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 155 

of pride in the town as the Casino. The Abbey of 
Fecamp was once a very rich and powerful estab- 
lishment, but nothing remains of it now save its 
church and its trappistine. The church, which is 
for the most part early gothic, is very stately and 
interesting, and the trappistine, a distilled liquor of 
the Chartreuse family, is much prized by people who 
take a little glass after their coffee. By the time I 
had done with the Abbey the townsfolk had slid 
en masse down the cliff again, the yellow afternoon 
had come, and the holiday-takers, before the wine- 
shops, made long and lively shadows. I hired a 
sort of two-wheeled gig, without a hood, and drove 
back to Etretat in the rosy stage of evening. The 
gig dandled me up and down in a fashion of which 
I had been unconscious since I left off baby-clothes ; 
but the drive, through the charming Norman 
country, over roads which lay among the peaceful 
meadows like paths across a park, was altogether 
delightful. The sunset gave a deeper mellowness 
to the standing crops, and in the grassiest corner of 
the wayside villages the young men and maidens 
were dancing like the figures in vignette-illustrations 
of classic poets. 

II. 

It was another picked day — you see how freely 
I pick them — when I went to breakfast at Saint- 
Jouin, chez la belle Ernestine. The beautiful 
Ernestine is as hospitable as she is fair, and to 
contemplate her charms you have only to order 
breakfast. They shine forth the more brilliantly in 
proportion as your order is liberal, and Ernestine is 



156 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [vil*. 

beautiful according as your bill is large. In this 
case she comes and smiles, really very handsomely, 
round your table, and you feel some hesitation in 
accusing so well-favoured a person of extortion. 
She keeps an inn at the end of a lane which diverges 
from the high road between Etretat and Havre, and 
it is an indispensable feature of your " station " at 
the former place that you choose some fine morning 
and seek her hospitality. She has been a celebrity 
these twenty years, and is no longer a simple maiden 
in her flower ; but twenty years, if they have 
diminished her early bloom, have richly augmented 
her musSe. This is a collection of all the verses 
and sketches, the autographs, photographs, mono- 
graphs, trinkets, presented to the amiable hostess by 
admiring tourists. It covers the walls of her 
sitting-room and fills half a dozen big albums which 
you look at while breakfast is being prepared, just 
as if you were awaiting dinner in genteel society. 
Most Frenchmen of the day whom one has heard of 
appear to have called at Saint-Jouin, and to have 
left their homages. Each of them has turned a 
compliment with pen or pencil, and you may see in 
a glass case on the parlour wall what Alexandre 
Dumas fils thought of the landlady's nose, and how 
several painters measured her ankles. 

Of course you must make this excursion in good 
company, and I affirm that I was in the very best. 
The company prefers, equally of course, to have its 
breakfast in the orchard in front of the house ; 
which, if the repast is good, will make it seem 
better still, and if it is poor, will carry off its poor- 
ness. Clever innkeepers should always make their 



Vin.] FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 157 

victims (in tolerable weather) eat in the garden. I 
forget whether Ernestine's breakfast was intrinsically 
good or bad, but I distinctly remember enjoying it, 
and making everything welcome. Everything, that 
is, save the party at the other table — the Paris 
actresses, and the American gentlemen. The com- 
bination of these two classes of persons, individually 
so delightful, results in certain phenomena which 
seem less in harmony with appleboughs and summer 
breezes than with the gas-lamps and thick perfumes 
of a cabinet particulier ; and yet it was characteristic 
of this odd mixture of things that Mademoiselle 
Ernestine, coming to chat with her customers, should 
bear a beautiful infant on her arm, and smile with 
artless pride on being assured of its filial resem- 
blance to herself. She looked handsomer than ever 
as she caressed this startling attribute of presumptive 
spinsterhood. 

Saint-Jouin is close to the sea and to the finest 
cliffs in the world. One of my companions, who 
had laden the carriage with the implements of a 
painter, went off into a sunny meadow to take the 
portrait of a windmill, and I, choosing the better 
portion, wandered through a little green valley with 
the other. Ten minutes brought us to the edge 
of the cliffs, which at this point of the coast are 
simply sublime. I had supposed the white sea- 
walls of Etretat the finest thing possible in this way, 
but the huge red porphyritic-looking masses of Saint- 
Jouin have an even grander character. I have 
rarely seen a landscape more " plastic." They are 
strange, fantastic, out of keeping with the country, 
ani for some rather arbitrary reason suggested to 



158 POETRAITS OF PLACES. [vill. 

me a Spanish or even an African prospect. Cer- 
tain sun-scorched precipices in Spanish sierras must 
have very much the same warmth of tone and de- 
solation of attitude. The great distinction of the 
cliffs of Saint-Jouin is their extraordinary double- 
ness. Falling to an immense depth, they encounter 
a certain outward ledge, or terrace, where they 
pause and play a dozen fantastic tricks, such as 
piling up rocks into the likeness of needles and 
watch-towers ; then they plunge again, and in an- 
other splendid sweep descend to the beach. There 
was something very impressive in the way their evil 
brows, looking as if they were stained with blood 
and rust, were bent upon the indifferent — the sleep- 
ing — sea. 

III. 

In a month of beautiful weather at Etretat, every 
day was not an excursion, but every day seemed 
indeed a picked day. For that matter, as I lay 
on the beach watching the procession of the easy- 
going hours, I took a good many mental excursions. 
The one, perhaps, on which I oftenest embarked, 
was a comparison between French manners, French 
habits, French types, and those of my native land. 
These comparisons are not invidious ; I do not con- 
clude against one party and in favour of the other ; 
as the French say, je constate simply. The French 
people about me were " spending the summer," just 
as I had so often seen my fellow-countrymen spend 
it, and it seemed to me, as it had seemed to me at 
home, that this operation places men and women 
under a sort of monstrous magnifying-glass. The 



viii.] FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 159 

human figure has a higher relief in the country than 
in town, and I know of no place where psycho- 
logical studies prosper so much as at the seaside. 
I shall not pretend to relate my observations in the 
order in which they occurred to me (or indeed to 
relate them in full at all) ; but I may say that one 
of the foremost was to this effect— that the summer- 
question, for every one, had been more easily settled 
than it usually is in America. The solution of the 
problem of where to go had not been a thin-petalled 
rose, plucked from among particularly sharp-pointed 
thorns. People presented themselves with a calm- 
ness and freshness very different from the haggard- 
ness of aspect which announces that the American 
citizen and his family have " secured accommoda- 
tions." This impression, with me, rests perhaps on 
the fact that most Frenchwomen turned of thirty — 
the average wives and mothers — are so comfortably 
endowed with flesh. I have never seen such rich- 
ness of contour as among the mature baigneuses of 
Etretat. The lean and desiccated person into whom 
a dozen years of matrimony so often converts the 
blooming American girl is not emulated in France. 
A majestic plumpness flourished all around me — 
the plumpness of triple chins and deeply dimpled 
hands. I mused upon it, and I discovered that it 
was the result of the best breakfasts and dinners in 
the world. It was the corpulence of ladies who are 
thoroughly well fed, and who never walk a step 
that they can spare. The assiduity with which the 
women of America measure the length of our 
democratic pavements is doubtless a factor in their 
frequent absence of redundancy of outline. As a 



160 POKTEAITS OF PLACES. [vm. 

" regular boarder " at the Hotel Blanquet — pro- 
nounced by Anglo-Saxon visitors Blanket — I found 
myself initiated into the mysteries of the French 
dietary system. I assent to the common tradition 
that the French are a temperate people, so long as 
it is understood in this sense — that they eat no 
more than they want to. But their wants are very 
comprehensive. Their capacity strikes me as enor- 
mous, and we ourselves, if we are less regulated, 
are certainly much more slender consumers. 

The American breakfast has, I believe, long been 
a subject of irony to the foreign observer ; but the 
American breakfast is an ascetic meal compared 
with the French d&jeilner-cb-la-fourchette. The latter, 
indeed, is simply a dinner without soup ; it differs 
neither generically nor specifically from the evening- 
repast. If it excludes soup, it includes eggs, pre- 
pared in a hundred forms ; and if it proscribes 
champagne, it admits beer in foaming pitchers, so 
that the balance is fairly preserved. I think that 
an American will often suffer vicariously from the 
reflection that a French family which sits down at 
half-past eleven to fish and entries and roasts, to 
asparagus and beans, to salad and dessert, and cheese 
and coffee, proposes to do exactly the same thing at 
half-past six. But we may be sure at any rate that 
the dinner will be as good as the breakfast, and that 
the breakfast has nothing to fear from prospective 
comparison with the dinner ; and we may further 
reflect that in a country where the pleasures of the 
table are thoroughly organised, it is natural that 
they should be prolonged and reiterated. Nothing is 
more noticeable among the French thai] their superior 



nil.] FKOM NORMANDY TO THE PYKENEES. 161 

intelligence in dietary matters ; every one seems 
naturally a judge, a dilettante. They have analysed 
tastes and savours to a finer point than we ; they 
are aware of differences and relations of which we 
take no heed. Observe a Frenchman of any age 
and of any condition (I have been quite as much 
struck with it in the very young men as in the old), 
as he orders his breakfast or his dinner at a Parisian 
restaurant, and you will perceive that the operation 
is much more solemn than it is apt to be in New 
York or in London. Monsieur has, in a word, a 
certain ideal for a particular repast, and it will 
make a difference in his happiness whether the 
kidneys, for. instance, of a certain style, are chopped 
to the ultimate or only to the penultimate smallness. 
His directions and admonitions to the waiter are 
therefore minute and exquisite, and eloquently 
accentuated by the pressure of thumb and fore- 
finger ; and it must be added that the imagination 
of the waiter is usually quite worthy of the refined 
communion opened to it. 

This subtler sense of quality is observable even 
among those classes in which in other countries it 
is generally forestalled by a depressing conscious- 
ness on the subject of quantity. Observe your 
concierge and his wife at their mid-day meal, as 
you pass up and down stairs. They are not satisfy- 
ing nature upon green tea and potatoes ; they are 
seated before a repast which has been reasoned out, 
which, on its modest scale, is served in courses, and 
has a beginning, a middle, an end. I wiil not say 
that the French sense of comfort is confined to the 
philosophy of nutrition, but it is certainly here that 

M 



162 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [vrn. 

it is most highly evolved. French people must 
have a good dinner and a good bed ; but they are 
willing that the bed should be stationed and the 
dinner be eaten in the most insufferable corners. 
Your porter and his wife dine with a certain dis- 
tinction, and sleep soft in their lodge ; but their 
lodge is in all probability a fetid black hole, five 
feet square, in which, in England or in America, 
people of their talents would never consent to live. 
The French are willing to abide in the dark, to huddle 
together, to forego privacy, to let bad smells grow 
great among them. They have an accursed passion for 
coquettish furniture; for cold, brittle chairs, for tables 
with scalloped edges, for ottomans without backs, for 
fireplaces muffled in plush and fringe. A French 
bedroom is a bitter mockery — a ghastly attempt to 
serve two masters which succeeds in being agreeable 
to neither. It is a thing of traps and delusions, 
constructed on the assumption that it is inelegant 
to be known to wash or to sleep, and yet pervaded 
with suggestions of uncleanness compared with 
which the matutinal "tub," well en Evidence, is a 
delightful symbol of purity. This comes of course 
from that supreme French quality, the source of half 
the charm of the French mind as well as of all its dry- 
ness, the genius for economy. It is wasting a room 
to let it be a bedroom alone ; so it must be tricked 
out ingeniously as a sitting-room, and ends by being 
(in many cases) insufferable both by night and by 
day. But allowing all weight to these latter reflec- 
tions, it is still very possible that the French have 
the better part. If you are well fed, you can per- 
haps afford to be ill lodged ; whereas enjoyment of 



Viii.] FKOM NOEMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 163 

the most commodious apartments is incompatible 
with inanition and dyspepsia. 

If I had not cut short my mild retrospect by 
these possibly milder generalisations, I should have 
touched lightly upon some of the social phenomena 
of which- the little beach at Etretat was the scene. 
I should have narrated that the French, at the sea- 
side, are not " sociable " as Americans affect to be 
in a similar situation, and I should subjoin that at 
Etretat it was very well on the whole that they 
should not have been. The immeasurably greater 
simplicity of composition of American society makes 
sociability with us a comparatively untaxed virtue; but 
anything like an equal exercise of it in France would 
be attended with alarming drawbacks. Sociability 
(in the American sense of the word) in any aristo- 
cratic country would indeed be very much like an 
attempt to establish visiting relations between birds 
and fishes. At Etretat no making of acquaintance 
was to be perceived ; people went about in compact, 
cohesive groups, of natural formation, governed 
doubtless, internally, by humane regulations, but 
presenting to the world an impenetrable defensive 
front. The groups usually formed a solid phalanx 
around two or three young girls, compressed into 
the centre, the preservation of whose innocence was 
their chief solicitude. These groups were doubtless 
wisely constituted, for with half a dozen cocottes, in 
scarlet petticoats, scattered over the sunny, harmless- 
looking beach, what were mammas and duennas to 
do ? I used to pity the young ladies at first, for 
this perpetual application of the leading-string ; but 
a little reflection showed me that the French have 



164 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [vm. 

ordered this as well as they have ordered everything 
else. The case is not nearly so hard as it would be 
with us, for there is this immense difference between 
the lot of the jeune fille and her American sister, 
that the former may as a general thing be said to 
be certain to marry. " Alas, to marry badly," the 
Anglo-Saxon objector may reply. But the objection 
is precipitate ; for if French marriages are almost 
always arranged, it must be added that they are in 
the majority of cases arranged successfully. There- 
fore, if a jeune fille is for three or four years tied 
with a very short rope and compelled to browse 
exclusively upon the meagre herbage which sprouts 
in the maternal shadow, she has at least the comfort 
of reflecting that, according to the native phrase, on 
s'occupe de la marier— that measures are being care- 
fully taken to promote her to a condition of un- 
bounded liberty. Whatever, to her imagination, 
marriage may fail to mean, it at least means freedom 
and consideration. It does not mean, as it so often 
means in America, being socially shelved — and it is 
not too much to say, in certain circles, degraded ; it 
means being socially launched and consecrated. It 
means becoming that exalted personage, a me're de 
famille. To be a me're de famille is to occupy not 
simply (as is mostly the case with us) a sentimental, 
but really an official position. The consideration, 
the authority, the domestic pomp and circumstance 
allotted to a French mamma are in striking contrast 
with the amiable tolerance which in our own social 
order is so often the most liberal measure that the 
female parent may venture to expect at her children's 
hands, and which, on the part of the young lady of 



Vin.] FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 1G5 

eighteen who represents the family in society, is not 
unfrequently tempered by a conscientious severity. 
All this is worth waiting for, especially if you have 
not to wait very long. Mademoiselle is married 
certainly, and married early, and she is sufficiently 
well informed to know, and to be sustained by the 
knowledge, that the sentimental expansion which 
may not take place at present will have an open 
field after her marriage. That it should precede her 
marriage seems to her as unnatural as that she 
should put on her shoes before her stockings. And 
besides all this, to browse in the maternal shadow is 
not considered in the least a hardship. A young 
French girl who is Men-6lev4e — an expression which 
means so much — will be sure to consider her 
mother's company the most delightful in the world, 
and to think that the herbage which sprouts about 
this lady's petticoats is peculiarly tender and suc- 
culent. It may be fanciful, but it often seems to 
me that the tone with which such a young girl says 
Ma m£re has a peculiar intensity of meaning. I am 
at least not wrong in affirming that in the accent 
with which the mamma — especially if she be of the 
well-rounded order alluded to above — speaks of Ma 
fille there is a kind of sacerdotal dignity. 

IV. 

After this came two or three pictures of quite 
another complexion — pictures of which a long green 
valley, almost in the centre of France, makes the 
general setting. The valley itself, indeed, forms one 
delightful picture, although the country which sur- 



166 PORTEAITS OF PLACES. [vm. 

rounds it is by no means one of the regions that 
place themselves on exhibition. It is the old terri- 
tory of the Gatinais, which has much history, but no 
renown of beauty. It is very quiet, deliciously rural, 
immitigably French ; the typical, average, " pleasant " 
France of history, literature, and art — of art, of 
landscape-art, perhaps, especially. Wherever I look 
I seem to see one of the familiar pictures on a 
dealer's wall — a Lambinet, a Troyon, a Daubigny, a 
Diaz. The Lambinets perhaps are in the majority ; 
the mood of the landscape usually expresses itself 
in silvery lights and vivid greens. The history of 
this part of France is the history of the monarchy, 
and its language is, I won't say absolutely the classic 
tongue, but a nearer approach to it than any local 
patois. The peasants deliver themselves with rather 
a drawl, but their French is as consecutive as that 
of Ollendorf. 

Each side of the long valley is a continuous 
ridge, which offers it a high, wooded horizon, and 
through the middle of it there flows a charming 
stream, wandering, winding and doubling, smothered 
here and there in rushes, and spreading into lily- 
coated reaches, beneath the clear shadow of tall, 
straight, light -leaved trees. On each side of the 
stream the meadows stretch away fiat, clean, magni- 
ficent, lozenged across with rows of lateral foliage, 
under which a cow-maiden sits on the grass, hooting 
now and then, nasally, to the large-uddered browsers 
in front of her. There are no hedges nor palings 
nor walls ; it is all a single estate. Occasionally in 
the meadows there rises a cluster of red-roofed hovels 
— each a diminutive village. At other points, at 



VIII.] FROM NOEMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 167 

about half an hour's walk apart, are three charming 
old houses. The chateaux are extremely different, 
but, both as pictures and as dwellings, each has its 
points. They are very intimate with each other, so 
that these points may be amicably discussed. The 
points in one case, however, are remarkably strong. 
The little old castel I mention stands directly in the 
attenuated river, on an island just great enough to 
hold it, and the garden-flowers grow upon the farther 
bank. This, of course, is a most delightful affair. 
But I found something very agreeable in the aspect 
of one of the others, when I made it the goal of cer- 
tain of those walks before breakfast, which of cool 
mornings, in the late summer, do not fall into the 
category of ascetic pleasures. (In France, indeed, if 
one did not do a great many things before breakfast, 
the work of life would be but meagrely performed.) 
The dwelling in question stands on the top of 
the long ridge which encloses the comfortable valley 
to the south, being by its position quite in the midst 
of its appurtenant acres. It is not particularly " kept 
up," but its quiet rustiness and untrimmedness only 
help it to be familiar. A grassy plateau approaches 
it from the edge of the hill, bordered on one side by 
a short avenue of horse-chestnuts, and on the other 
by a dusky wood. Beyond the chestnuts are the 
steep -roofed, yellow -walled farm -buildings, and 
under cover of the wood a stretch of beaten turf, 
where, on Sundays and holidays, the farm-servant3 
play at bowls. Directly before the house is a little 
square garden, enclosed by a low parapet, which is 
interrupted by a high gateway of mossy pillars and 
iron arabesques, the whole of it muffled in creeping 



168 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. . [vin. 

plants. The house, with its yellow walls and russet 
roof, is ample and substantial ; it is a very proper 
gentilhommi&re. In a corner of the garden, at the 
angle of the parapet, rises that classic emblem of 
rural gentility, the pigeonnier, the old stone dove- 
cot. It is a great round tower, as broad of base as 
a lighthouse, with its roof shaped like an extin- 
guisher, and a big hole in its upper portion, in and 
out of which a dove is always fluttering. 

You see all this from the windows of the drawing- 
room. Be sure that the drawing-room is panelled 
in white and gray, with old rococo mouldings over 
the doorways and mantelpiece. The open gateway 
of the garden, with its tangled creepers, makes a 
frame for the picture that lies beyond the grassy 
esplanade where the thistles have been suffered to 
grow round a disused stone well, placed in odd 
remoteness from the house (if, indeed, it be not a 
relic of an earlier habitation) : a picture of a wide 
green country, rising beyond the unseen valley and, 
stretching away to a far horizon in deep blue lines 
of wood. Behind, through other windows, you look 
out on the gardens proper. There are places that 
take one's fancy by some accident of expression, 
gome mystery of accident. This one is high and 
breezy, both genial and reserved, plain yet pictur- 
esque, extremely cheerful and a little melancholy. 
It has what in the arts is called " style," and so I 
have attempted to commemorate it. 

Going to call on the peasants was as charming 
an affair as a chapter in one of George Sand's rural 
tales. I went one Sunday morning with my hostess, 
who knew them well and enjoyed their most gar- 



Viii.] FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 169 

rulous confidence. I don't mean that they told her 
all their secrets, but they told her a good many; if 
the French peasant is a simpleton, he is a very 
shrewd simpleton. At any rate, of a Sunday morn- 
ing in August, when he is stopping at home from 
work and has put on his best jacket and trousers, 
and is loafing at the door of his neighbour's cabin, 
he is a very charming person. The peasantry in 
the region I speak of had admirably good manners. 
The cure gave me a low account of their morals, by 
which he meant, on the whole, I suspect, that they 
were moderate church-goers. But they have the 
instinct of civility and a talent for conversation ; 
they know how to play the host and the entertainer. 
By " he," just now, I meant she quite as much ; it 
is rare that, in speaking superlatively of the French, 
in any connection, one does not think of the women 
even more than of the men. They constantly strike 
the foreigner as a stronger expression of the qualities 
of the race. On the occasion I speak of the first 
room in the very humble cabins I successively 
visited — in some cases, evidently, it was the only 
room — had been set into irreproachable order for the 
day. It had usually a fine brownness of tone, gen- 
erated by the high chimney-place, with its swinging 
pots, the important bed, in its dusky niche, with its 
flowered curtains, the big-bellied earthenware in the 
cupboard, the long-legged clock in the corner, the 
thick, quiet light of the small, deeply-set window, 
the mixture, on all things, of smoke-stain and the 
polish of horny hands. Into the midst of this " la 
Rabillon " or " la mere Leger " brings forward her 
chairs and begs us to be seated, and, seating her- 



170 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [vin. 

self, with crossed hands, smiles expressively and 
answers abundantly every inquiry about her cow, 
her husband, her bees, her eggs, her baby. The men 
linger half outside and half in, with their shoulders 
against dressers and door-posts ; every one smiles 
with that simple, clear -eyed smile of the gratified 
peasant ; they talk much more like George Sand's 
Berrichons than might be supposed. And if they 
receive us without gross awkwardness, they speed 
us on our way with proportionate urbanity. I go 
to six or eight little hovels, all of them dirty outside 
and clean within ; I am entertained everywhere with 
the bonhomie, the quaintness, the good faces and 
good manners of their occupants, and I finish my 
tour with an esteem for my new acquaintance which 
is not diminished by learning that several of them 
have thirty or forty thousand francs carefully put 
away. 

And yet, as I say, M. le Cure - thinks they are in 
a bad way, and he knows something about them. 
M. le Curd, too, is not a dealer in scandal ; there is 
something delightfully quaint in the way in which 
he deprecates an un-Christian construction of his 
words. There is more than one cure" in the valley 
whose charms I celebrate ; but the worthy priest of 
whom I speak is the pearl of the local priesthood. 
He has been accused, I believe, of pretensions to 
illuminisme ; but even in his most illuminated 
moments it can never occur to him that he has been 
chronicled in an American magazine, and therefore 
it is not indiscreet to say that he is the curd, not of 
Gy, but of the village nearest to Gy. I write this 
sentence half for the pleasure of putting down that 



vin.] FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 171 

briefest of village-names and seeing how it looks in 
print. But it may be elongated at will, and yet be 
only improved. If you wish to be very specific, 
you may call it Gy-les-Nonnains — Gy of the Little 
Nuns. I went with my hostess, another morning, 
to call upon M. le Cur^, who himself opened his 
garden door to us (there was a crooked little black 
cross perched upon it), and, lifting his rusty calotte, 
stood there a moment in the sunshine, smiling a 
greeting more benignant than his words. 

A rural jprcsbytdre is not a very sumptuous dwell- 
ing, and M. le Curb's little drawing-room reminded 
me of a Yankee parlour (minus the subscription- 
books from Hartford on the centre-table) in some 
out-of-the-way corner of New England. But he 
took us into his very diminutive garden, and showed 
us an ornament that would not have flourished in 
the shadow of a Yankee parlour — a rude stone 
image of the Virgin, which he had become possessed 
of I know not how, and for which he was building 
a sort of niche in the wall. The work was going 
on slowly, for he must take the labour as he could 
get it ; but he appealed to his visitors, with a smile 
of indulgent irony, for an assurance that his little 
structure would not make too bad a figure. One of 
them told him that she would send him some 
white flowers to set out round the statue ; where- 
upon he clasped his hands together over his snuff- 
box and expressed cheerful views of ' the world we 
live in. A couple of days afterward he came to 
breakfast, and of course arrived early, in his Lew 
cassock and band. I found him in the billiard- 
room, walking up and down alone and reading his 



172 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [vin. 

breviary. The combination of the locality, the per- 
sonage and the occupation, made me smile ; and I 
smiled again when, after breakfast, I found him 
strolling about the garden, puffing a cigarette. Of 
course he had an excellent appetite; but there is 
something rather cruel in those alternations of diet 
to which the French parish priest is subjected. At 
home he lives like a peasant — a fact which, in 
itself, is not particularly cruel, inasmuch as he has 
usually — or in many cases — been brought up to 
that life. But his fellow -peasants don't breakfast 
at the chateau and gaze down the savoury vistas 
opened by cutlets a la Soubise. They have not the 
acute pain of relapsing into the stale atmosphere of 
bread and beans. Of course it is by no means 
every day, or every week even, that M. le Cure* 
breakfasts at the "chateau; but there must never- 
theless be a certain uncomfortable crookedness in his 
position. He lives like a labourer, yet he is treated 
like a gentleman. The latter character must seem 
to him sometimes to have rather a point of irony. 
But to the ideal cure, of course, all characters are 
equal ; he thinks neither too ill of his bad break- 
fasts nor too well of his good ones. I won't say 
that the excellent man I speak of is the ideal cure\ 
but I suspect he is an approach to it ; he has a 
grain of the epicurean to an ounce of stoicism. In 
the garden-path, beside the moat, while he puffed 
his cigarette, he told me how he had held up his 
head to the Prussians ; for, hard as it seemed to 
believe it, that pastoral valley had been occupied by 
ravaging Teutons. According to this recital, he had 
spoken his mind civilly, but very distinctly, to the 



vin.] FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 173 

group of officers who had made themselves at home 
in his dwelling — had informed them that it grieved 
him profoundly that he was obliged to meet them 
standing there in his soutane, and not out in the 
fields with a musket in his hands and a dozen 
congenial- spirits at his side. The scene must have 
been dramatic. The first of the officers got up from 
table and asked for the privilege of shaking his 
hand. "M. le Cure," he said, "j'estime hautement 
votre caractere." 

Six miles away — or nearer, by a charming shaded 
walk along a canal — was an ancient town with a 
legend — a legend which, as a child, I read in my 
lesson -book at school, marvelling at the woodcut 
above it, in which a ferocious dog was tearing a 
strange man to pieces, while the king and his 
courtiers sat by as if they were at the circus. I 
allude to it chiefly in order to mention the name of 
one of its promenades, which is the stateliest, beyond 
all comparison, in the world ; the name, I mean, 
not the street. The latter is called the Promenade 
des Belles Manieres. Could anything be finer than 
that ? With what a sweep gentlemen must once 
have taken off their hats there ; how ladies must 
once have curtsied, regardless of gutters, and how 
people must have turned out their toes as they 
talked ! 

V. 

My next impressions were gathered on the 
margin of a southern sea — if the Bay of Biscay in- 
deed deserve so sympathetic a name. We gene- 
rally have a mental image beforehand of a place on 



174 POKTKAITS OF PLACES. [vm. 

which we may intend to project ourself, and I sup- 
posed I had a tolerably vivid prevision of Biarritz. 
I don't know why, but I had a singular sense of 
having been there; the name always seemed to me 
expressive. I saw the way it lay along its gleam- 
ing beach ; I had taken in imagination long walks 
toward Spain over the low cliffs, with the blue sea 
always to my right and the blue Pyrenees always 
before me. My only fear was that my mental 
picture had not been brilliant enough; but this 
could easily be touched up on the spot. In truth, 
however, on the spot I was exclusively occupied in 
toning it down. Biarritz seemed to be decidedly 
below its reputation ; I am at a loss to see how its 
reputation was made. There is a partial explana- 
tion that is obvious enough. There is a low, square, 
bare brick mansion seated on the sands, under shelter 
of a cliff; it is one of the first objects to attract the 
attention of an arriving stranger. It is not pic- 
turesque, it is not romantic, and even in the days 
of its prosperity it never can have been impressive. 
It is called the Villa Eugenie, and it explains in a 
great measure, as I say, the Biarritz which the 
arriving stranger, with some dismay, perceives about 
nim. It has the aspect of one of the " cottages " 
of Newport during the winter season, but is sur- 
rounded by a vegetation much less dense than the 
prodigies of arborescence now so frequent at New- 
port. It was what the newspapers call the " favourite 
resort " of the ex-Empress of the Erench, who might 
have been seen at her imperial avocations with a 
good glass, at any time, from the Casino. The 
Casino, I hasten to add, has quite the air of an 



viii.] FKOM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 175 

establishment frequented by gentlemen who look at 
ladies' windows with telescopes. There are Casinos 
and Casinos, and that of Biarritz is, in the summary 
French phrase, "impossible." Except for its view, 
it is moreover very unattractive. Perched on the 
top of a cliff which has just space enough to hold 
its immense brick foundations, it has no garden, no 
promenade, no shade, no place of out-of-door reunion 
— the most indispensable feature of a Casino. It 
turns its back to the Pyrenees and to Spain, and 
looks out prettily enough over a blue ocean to an 
arm of the low French coast. 

Biarritz, for the rest, scrambles over two or three 
steep hills, directly above the sea, in a promiscuous, 
many- coloured, noisy fashion. It is a watering- 
place pure and simple ; every house has an ex- 
pensive little shop in the basement and a still more 
expensive set of rooms to let above stairs. The 
houses are blue and pink and green ; they stick to 
the hillsides as they can, and being near Spain, you 
try to fancy they look Spanish. You succeed, per- 
haps, even a little, and are rewarded for your zeal 
by finding, when you cross the border a few days 
afterward, that the houses at San Sebastian look 
strikingly French. Biarritz is bright, crowded, 
irregular, filled with many sounds, and not without 
a certain second-rate pictorial quality ; but it 
struck me as common and cockneyfied, and my vision 
travelled back to modest little Etretat, by its north- 
ern sea, as to a very much more downy couch. 
The south-western coast of France has little of the 
exquisite charm of the Mediterranean shore. It 
has of course a southern expression which in itself 



176 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [vin. 

is always delightful. You see a brilliant, yellow 
sun, with a pink-faced, red-tiled house staring up at 
it. You can see here and there a trellis and an 
orange -tree, a peasant -woman in a gold necklace, 
driving a donkey, a lame beggar adorned with ear- 
rings, a glimpse of blue sea between white garden- 
walls. But the superabundant detail of the French 
Eiviera is wanting ; the softness, luxuriousness, 
enchantment. 

The most pictorial thing at Biarritz is the Basque 
population, which overflows from the adjacent Spanish 
provinces and swarms in the crooked streets. It 
lounges all day in the public places, sprawls upon 
the curbstones, clings to the face of the cliffs, and 
vociferates continually a shrill, strange tongue, which 
has no discoverable affinity with any other. The 
Basques look like hardier and thriftier Neapolitan 
lazzaroni ; if the superficial resemblance is striking, 
the difference is very much in their favour. Although 
those specimens which I observed at Biarritz ap- 
peared to enjoy an excess of leisure, they had nothing 
of a shiftless or beggarly air, and seemed as little 
disposed to ask favours as to confer them. The roads 
leading into Spain were dotted with them, and here 
they were coming and going as if on important busi- 
ness — the business of the abominable Don Carlos 
himself. They struck me as a very handsome race. 
The men are invariably clean-shaven ; smooth chins 
seem a positively religious observance. They wear 
little round maroon-coloured caps, like those of sailor- 
boys, dark stuff shirts, and curious white shoes, made 
of strips of rope laid together — an article of toilet 
which makes them look like honorary members of 



VIII.] FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 177 

base-ball clubs. They sling their jackets cavalier- 
fashion, over one shoulder, hold their heads very 
high, swing their arms very bravely, step out very 
lightly, and, when you meet them in the country at 
eventide, charging down a hillside in companies of 
half a dozen, make altogether a most impressive 
appearance. With their smooth chins and childish 
caps, they may be taken, in the distance, for a lot of 
very naughty little boys ; for they have always a 
cigarette in their teeth. 

The best thing at Biarritz is your opportunity for 
driving over into Spain. Coming speedily to a con- 
sciousness of this fact, I found a charm in sitting in 
a landau and rolling away to San Sebastian behind 
a coachman in a high glazed hat with long streamers, a 
jacket of scarlet and silver and a pair of yellow 
breeches and jack-boots. If it has been the desire 
of one's heart and the dream of one's life to visit 
the land of Cervantes, even grazing it so lightly as 
by a day's excursion from Biarritz is a matter to en- 
courage visions. Everything helping — the admirable 
scenery, the charming day, the operatic coachman, 
the smooth-rolling carriage — I am afraid I became 
more visionary than it is decent to tell of. You move 
toward the magnificent undulations of the Pyrenees, 
as if you were going to plunge straight into them ; 
but in reality you travel beneath them and beside 
them, pass between their expiring spurs and the sea. 
It is on proceeding beyond San Sebastian that you 
seriously attack them. But they are already ex- 
tremely vivid — none the less so that in this region 
thev abound in suggestions of the recent Carlist war. 
Their far-away peaks and ridges are crowned with 

N 



178 PORTKAITS OF PLACES. [vm. 

lonely Spanish watch-towers, and their lower slopes 
are dotted with demolished dwellings. It was here- 
abouts that the fighting was most constant. But the 
healing powers of nature are as remarkable as the 
destructive powers of man, and the rich September 
landscape appeared already to have forgotten the 
injuries of yesterday. Everything seemed to me a 
small foretaste of Spain ; I discovered an unreason- 
able amount of local colour. I discovered it at Saint- 
Jean-de-Luz, the last French town, in a great brown 
church, filled with galleries and boxes, like a play- 
house — the altar and choir, indeed, looked very much 
like a proscenium ; at Bobibie, on the Bidassoa, the 
small yellow stream which divides France from Spain, 
and which at this point offers to view the celebrated 
Isle of Pheasants, a little bushy strip of earth adorned 
with a decayed commemorative monument, on which, 
in the seventeenth century, the affairs of Louis XIV. 
and the Iberian monarch were discussed in ornamental 
conference ; at Fuentarabia (glorious name), a mould- 
ering relic of Spanish stateliness ; at Hendaye, at 
Irun, at Eenteria, and finally at San Sebastian. At 
all of these wayside towns the houses show marks of 
Alphonsist bullets (the region was strongly Carlist) ; 
but to be riddled and battered seems to carry out 
the meaning of the pompous old escutcheons carven 
above the doorways, some of them covering almost 
half the house. It struck me, in fact, that the nar- 
rower and shabbier was the poor little dusky dwelling, 
the grander and more elaborate was this noble adver- 
tisement. But it represented knightly prowess, and 
pitiless time had taken up the challenge. I found 
it a luxury to ramble through the narrow single 



viii.] FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 179 

street of Iran and Kenteria, between the strange- 
coloured houses, the striped awnings, the universal 
balconies and the heraldic doorways. 

San Sebastian is a lively watering-place, and is 
set down in the guide-books as the Biarritz or the 
Brighton of Spain. It has of course a new quarter 
in the provincial -elegant style (fresh stucco cafes, 
barber- shops, and apartments to let), looking out 
upon a planted promenade and a charming bay, 
locked in fortified heights, with a narrow portal to 
the ocean. I walked about for two or three hours and 
devoted most of my attention to the old quarter, the 
town proper, which has a great frowning gate upon 
the harbour, through which you look along a vista of 
gaudy house -fronts, balconies, awnings, surmounted 
by a narrow strip of sky. Here the local colour was 
richer, the manners more naif. Here too was a church 
with a flamboyant Jesuit facade and an interior redo- 
lent of Spanish Catholicism. There was a life-sized 
effigy of the Virgin perched upon a table beside the 
great altar (she appeared to have been walking abroad 
in a procession), which I looked at with extreme 
interest. She seemed to me a heroine, a solid Spanish 
person, as perfect a reality as Don Quixote or Saint 
Theresa. She was dressed in an extraordinary splen- 
dour of laces, brocades and jewels, her coiffure and 
complexion were of the finest, and she evidently 
would answer to her name if you should speak to 
her. Mustering up the stateliest title I could think 
of, I addressed her as Dona Maria of the Holy Office; 
whereupon she looked round the great dusky, per- 
fumed church, to see whether we were alone, and 
then she dropped her fringed eyelids and held out 



180 TORTKAITS OF PLACES. [viri. 

her hand to be kissed. She was the sentiment of 
Spanish Catholicism; gloomy, yet bedizened, emotional 
as a woman and mechanical as a doll. After a mo- 
ment I grew afraid of her, and went slinking away. 
After this I didn't really recover my spirits until I 
had the satisfaction of hearing myself addressed as 
" Caballero." I was hailed with this epithet by a 
ragged infant, with sickly eyes and a cigarette in his 
lips, who invited me to cast a copper into the sea, 
that he might dive for it ; and even with these 
limitations, the sensation seemed worth the cost of 
my excursion. It appeared kinder, to my gratitude, 
to make the infant dive upon the pavement. 

A few days later I went back to San Sebastian, 
to be present at a bull -fight; but I suppose my 
right to descant upon this entertainment should be 
measured less by the gratification it afforded me than 
by the question whether there is room in literature 
for another chapter on this subject. I incline to 
think there is not ; the national pastime of Spain is 
the best-described thing in the world. Besides, there 
are other reasons for not describing it. It is ex- 
tremely disgusting, and one should not describe 
disgusting things — except (according to the new 
school) in novels, where they have not really occurred, 
and are invented on purpose. Description apart, 
one has taken a certain sort of pleasure in the bull- 
fight, and yet how is one to state gracefully that one 
has taken pleasure in a disgusting thing 1 It is a 
hard case. If you record your pleasure, you seem 
to exaggerate it and to calumniate your delicacy; 
and if you record nothing but your displeasure, you 



Vili.] FEOM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES. 181 

feel as if you were wanting in suppleness. Thus 
much I can say, at any rate, that as there had been 
no bull-fights in that part of the country during the 
Carlist war, the native dilettanti (and every man, 
woman, and child of them comes under this denomi- 
nation) • returned to their precious pastime with 
peculiar zest. The spectacle, therefore, had an un- 
usual splendour. Under these circumstances it is 
highly effective. The weather was beautiful; the 
near mountains peeped over the top of the vast open 
arena, as if they too were curious ; weary of disem- 
bowelled horses and posturing espadas, the spectator 
(in the boxes) might turn away and look through an 
unglazed window at the empty town and the cloud- 
shadowed sea. But few of the native spectators 
availed themselves of this privilege. Beside me sat a 
blooming matron, in a white lace mantilla, with three 
very juvenile daughters ; and if these ladies some- 
times yawned they never shuddered. For myself, I 
confess that if I sometimes shuddered I never yawned. 
A long list of bulls was sacrificed, each of whom had 
pretensions to originality. The landerillos, in their 
silk stockings and embroidered satin costumes, 
skipped about with a great deal of attitude ; the 
espada folded his arms within six inches of the bull's 
nose and stared him out of countenance; yet I thought 
the bull, in any case, a finer fellow than any of his 
tormentors, and I thought his tormentors finer fellows 
than the spectators. In truth, we were all, for the 
time, rather sorry fellows together. A bull -fight 
will, to a certain extent, bear looking at, but it will 
not bear thinking of. There was a more innocent 



182 POKTEAITS OF PLACES. [vm. 

effect in what I saw afterward, when we all came 
away, in the late afternoon, as the shadows were at 
their longest : the bright-coloured southern crowd, 
spreading itself over the grass, and the women, with 
mantillas and fans, and the Andalusian gait, strolling 
up and down before the mountains and the sea. 



IX. 

AN ENGLISH EASTER 

1877. 

I. 

It may "be said of the English, as is said of the 
council of war in Sheridan's farce of The Critic by 
one of the spectators of the rehearsal, that when 
they do agree, their unanimity is wonderful. They 
differ among themselves greatly just now as regards 
the machinations of Eussia, the derelictions of 
Turkey, the merits of the Eeverend Arthur Tooth, 
the genius of Mr. Henry Irving, and a good many 
other matters ; but neither just now nor at any 
other time do they fail to conform to those social 
observances on which respectability has set her seal. 
England is a country of curious anomalies, and this 
has much to do with her being so interesting to 
foreign observers. The English individual character 
is very positive, very independent, very much made 
up according to its own sentiment of things, very 
prone to startling eccentricities ; and yet at the same 
time it has beyond any other this peculiar gift of 
squaring itself with fashion and custom. In no 



184 PORTE AITS OF PLACES. [ix. 

other country, I imagine, are so many people to be 
found doing the same thing, in the same way, at 
the same time — using the same slang, wearing the 
same hats and neckties, collecting the same china- 
plates, playing the same game of lawn-tennis or of 
polo, admiring the same professional beauty. The 
monotony of such a spectacle would soon become 
oppressive if the foreign observer were not conscious 
of this latent capacity in the performers for great 
freedom of action ; he finds a good deal of entertain- 
ment in wondering how they reconcile the tra- 
ditional insularity of the individual with this per- 
petual tribute to usage. Of course, in all civilised 
societies, the tribute to usage is constantly paid ; if 
it is less apparent in America than elsewhere the 
reason is not, I think, because individual independence 
is greater, but because usage is more sparsely estab- 
lished. "Where custom can be ascertained people 
certainly follow it ; but for one definite precedent 
in American life there are fifty in English. I am 
very far from having discovered the secret ; I have 
not in the least learned what becomes of that 
explosive personal force in the English character 
which is compressed and corked down by social 
conformity. I look with a certain awe at some of 
the manifestations of the conforming spirit, but the 
fermenting idiosyncrasies beneath it are hidden from 
my vision. The most striking example, to foreign 
eyes, of the power of custom in England is, of 
course, the universal church-going. In the sight of 
the English people getting up from its tea and toast 
of a Sunday morning and brushing its hat, and 
drawing on its gloves, and taking its wife on its 



ix.] AN ENGLISH EASTEK. 185 

arm, and making its offspring march before, and so, 
for decency's, respectability's, propriety's sake, tak- 
ing its way to a place of worship appointed by the 
State, in which it repeats the formulas of a creed 
to which it attaches no positive sense, and listens 
to a sermon over the length of which it explicitly 
haggles and grumbles — in this exhibition there is 
something very striking to a stranger, something 
which he hardly knows whether to regard as a great 
force or as a great infirmity. He inclines, on the 
whole, to pronounce the spectacle sublime, because 
it gives him the feeling that whenever it may be- 
come necessary for a people trained in these 
manoeuvres to move all together under a common 
direction, they will have it in them to do so with 
tremendous weight and cohesiveness. We hear a 
good deal about the effect of the Prussian military 
system in consolidating the German people and 
making them available for a particular purpose ; but 
I really think it not fanciful to say that the military 
punctuality which characterises the English observ- 
ance of Sunday ought to be appreciated in the 
same fashion. A nation which has passed through 
the mill will certainly have been stamped by it. 
And here, as in the German military service, it is 
really the whole nation. When I spoke just now 
of paterfamilias and his entourage I did not mean 
to limit the statement to him. The young un- 
married men go to church, the gay bachelors, the 
irresponsible members of society. (That last epithet 
_nust be taken with a grain of allowance. No one 
in England is literally irresponsible ; that perhaps 
is the shortest way of describing the nation. 



186 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [ix. 

Every one is free and every one is responsible. 
To say what it is people are responsible to is of 
course a great extension of the question : briefly, to 
social expectation, to propriety, to morality, to 
"position," to the classic English conscience, which 
is, after all, such a powerful factor. With us there 
is infinitely less responsibility ; but there is also, 
I think, less freedom.) 

The way in which the example of the more 
luxurious classes imposes itself upon the less luxu- 
rious may of course be noticed in smaller matters 
than church-going ; in a great many matters which 
it may seem trivial to mention. If one is bent 
upon observation, nothing, however, is trivial. So 
I may cite the practice of banishing the servants 
from the room at breakfast. It is the fashion, 
and accordingly, through the length and breadth of 
England, every one who has the slightest pretension 
to standing high enough to feel the way the social 
breeze is blowing conforms to it. It is awkward, 
unnatural, troublesome for those at table, it involves 
a vast amount of leaning and stretching, of waiting 
and perambulating, and it has just that vice against 
which, in English history, all great movements have 
been made — it is arbitrary. But it flourishes for 
all that, and all genteel people, looking into each 
other's eyes with the desperation of gentility, agree 
to endure it for gentility's sake. My instance may 
seem feeble, and I speak honestly when I say I 
might give others, forming part of an immense body 
of prescriptive usage, to which a society possessing 
in the largest manner, both by temperament and 
education, the sense of the " inalienable " rights and 



IX.] AN ENGLISH EASTEK. 187 

comforts of the individual, contrives to accommodate 
itself. I do not mean to say that usage in England 
is always uncomfortable and arbitrary. On the con- 
trary, few strangers can be unfamiliar with that 
sensation (a most agreeable one) which consists in 
perceiving in the rigidity of a tradition which has 
struck one at first as mechanical, a reason existing 
in the historic " good sense " of the English race. 
The sensation is frequent, though in saying so I do 
not mean to imply that even superficially the pre- 
sumption is against the usages of English society. 
It is not, for instance, necessarily against the custom 
of which I had it more especially in mind to speak 
in writing these lines. The stranger in London is 
forewarned that at Easter all the world goes out of 
town, and that if he have no mind to be left as 
lonely as Marius on the ruins of Carthage, he, too, 
had better make arrangements for a temporary 
absence. It must be admitted that there is a sort 
of unexpectedness in this prompt re-emigration of a 
body of people who, but a week before, were appar- 
ently devoting much energy to settling down for 
the season. Half of them have but lately come 
back from the country, where they have been spend- 
ing the winter, and they have just had time, it may 
be supposed, to collect the scattered threads of 
town -life. Presently, however, the threads are 
dropped and society is dispersed, as if it had taken 
a false start. It departs as Holy "Week draws to 
a close, and remains absent for the following ten 
days. Where it goes is its own affair; a good deal 
of it goes to Paris. Spending last winter in that 
city, I remember how, when I woke up on Easter 



188 POETRAITS OF PLACES. [IX 

Monday and looked out of my window, I found the 
street covered, overnight, with a sort of snow-fall of 
disembarked Britons. They made, for other people, 
an uncomfortable week of it. One's customary table 
at the restaurant, one's habitual stall at the Theatre 
Erancais, one's usual fiacre on the cab-stand, were 
very apt to have suffered pre-emption. I believe 
that the pilgrimage to Paris was this year of the 
usual proportions ; and you may be sure that people 
who did not cross the Channel were not without 
invitations to quiei old places in the country, where 
the pale, fresh primroses were beginning to light up 
the dark turf and the purple bloom of the bare tree- 
masses to be freckled here and there with verdure 
In England country-life is the obverse of the medal, 
town-life the reverse, and when an occasion comes 
for quitting London there are few members of what 
the French call the " easy class " who have not a 
collection of dull, moist, verdant resorts to choose 
from. Dull I call them, and I fancy not without 
reason, though at the moment I speak of, their dul- 
ness must have been mitigated by the unintermittent 
presence of the keenest and liveliest of east winds. 
Even in mellow English country homes Easter-tide 
is a period of rawness and atmospheric acridity — 
the moment at which the frank hostility of winter, 
which has at last to give up the game, turns to 
peevishness and spite. This is what makes it arbi- 
trary, as I said just now, for " easy " people to go 
forth to the wind-swept lawns and the shivering 
parks. But nothing is more striking to an American 
than the frequency of English holidays and the large 
way in which occasions for " a little change " are 



IX.] AN ENGLISH EASTER. 189 

made use of. All this speaks to Americans of three 
things which they are accustomed to see allotted in 
scantier measure. The English have more time 
than we, they have more money, and they have a 
much higher relish for active leisure. Leisure, 
fortune,- and the love of sport — these things are 
implied in English society at every turn. It was 
a very small number of weeks before Easter that 
Parliament met, and yet a ten days' recess was 
already, from the luxurious Parliamentary point of 
view, a necessity. A short time hence we shall be 
having the Whitsuntide holidays, which I am told 
are even more of a season of revelry than Easter, 
and from this point to midsummer, when everything 
stops, it is an easy journey. The men of business 
and the professional men partake in equal measure 
of these agreeable diversions, and I was interested 
in hearing a lady whose husband was an ' active 
member of the bar say that, though he was leaving 
town with her for ten days, and though Easter 
was a very nice " little break," they really 
amused themselves more during the later festival, 
which would come on toward the end of May. 
I thought this highly probable, and admired so 
.Iramatic an interfusion of work and play. If my 
phrase has a slightly ironical sound, this is purely 
accidental A large appetite for holidays, the 
ability not only to take them but to know what to 
do with them when taken, is the sign of a robust 
people, and judged by this measure we Americans 
are rather incompetent. Such holidays as we take 
are taken very often in Europe, where it is some- 
times noticeable that our privilege is rather heavy 



190 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [ix. 

on our hands. Acknowledgment made of English 
industry, however (our own stands in no need of 
compliments), it must be added that for those same 
easy classes I just spoke of things are very easy 
indeed. The number of persons obtainable for 
purely social purposes at all times and seasons is 
infinitely greater than among ourselves ; and the 
ingenuity of the arrangements permanently going 
forward to disembarrass them of their superfluous 
leisure is as yet in America an undeveloped branch 
of civilisation. The young men who are preparing 
for the stern realities of life among the gray -green 
cloisters of Oxford are obliged to keep their terms 
but half the year; and the rosy little cricketers of 
Eton and Harrow are let loose upon the parental 
home for an embarrassing number of months. 
Happily the parental home is apt to be an affair 
of gardens, lawns, and parks. 

II. 

Passion "Week, in London, is distinctly an ascetic 
period ; there is really an approach to sackcloth and 
ashes. Private dissipation is suspended; most of 
the theatres and music-halls are closed ; the huge 
dusky city seems to take on a still sadder colouring 
and a sort of hush steals over its mighty uproar. 
At such a time, for a stranger, London is not cheer- 
ful. Arriving there, during the past winter, about 
Christmas-time, I encountered three British Sundays 
in a row — a spectacle to strike terror into the 
stoutest heart. A Sunday and a " bank-holiday," 
if I remember aright, had joined hands with a Christ- 



IX.] AN ENGLISH EASTER. 191 

mas-day, and produced the portentous phenomenon 
to which I allude. I betrayed, I suppose, some 
apprehension of its oppressive character, for I remem- 
ber being told in a consolatory way that I needn't 
fear; it would not come round again for another 
year. This information was given me on the 
occasion of that surprising interruption of one's 
relations with the laundress which is apparently 
characteristic of the period. I was told that all the 
washerwomen were intoxicated, and that, as it would 
take them some time to revive, I must not count 
upon a relay of " fresh things." I shall not forget 
the impression made upon me by this statement ; I 
had just come from Paris and it almost sent me 
spinning back. One of the incidental agrements of 
life in the latter city had been the knock at my 
door on Saturday evenings of a charming young 
woman with a large basket covered with a snowy 
napkin on her arm, and on her head a frilled and 
fluted muslin cap, which was an irresistible adver- 
tisement of her art. To say that my admirable 
Manchisseuse was not in liquor is altogether too gross 
a compliment ; but I was always grateful to her for 
her russet cheek, her frank, expressive eye, her talk- 
ative smile, for the way her charming cap was poised 
upon her crisp, dense hair, and her well-made dress 
was fitted to her well-made waist. I talked with 
her ; I could talk with her ; and as she talked she 
moved about and laid out her linen with a delight- 
ful modest ease. Then her light step carried her off 
again, talking, to the door, and with a brighter smile 
and an "Adieu, monsieur !" she closed it behind her, 
leaving one to think how stupid is prejudice and how 



192 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [ix. 

poetic a creature a washerwoman may be. London, 
in December, was livid with sleet and fog, and 
against this dismal background was offered me the 
vision of a horrible old woman in a smoky bonnet, 
lying prone in a puddle of whisky ! She seemed 
to assume a kind of symbolic significance, and she 
almost frightened me away. 

I mention this trifle, which is doubtless not 
creditable to my fortitude, because I found that the 
information given me was not strictly accurate, and 
that at the end of three months I had another array 
of London Sundays to face. On this occasion, how- 
ever, nothing occurred to suggest again the dreadful 
image I have just sketched, though I devoted a good 
deal of time to observing the manners of the lower 
orders. From Good Friday to Easter Monday, in- 
clusive, they were very much en Evidence, and it was 
an excellent occasion for getting an impression of 
the British populace. Gentility had retired to the 
background, and in the "West End all the blinds were 
lowered ; the streets were void of carriages, and well- 
dressed pedestrians were rare; but the "masses" 
were all abroad and making the most of their holi- 
day, and I strolled about and watched them at their 
gambols. The heavens were most unfavourable, but 
in an English " outing " there is always a margin 
left for a drenching, and throughout the vast smoky 
city, beneath the shifting gloom of the sky, the 
grimy crowds trooped about with a kind of weather- 
proof stolidity. The parks were full of them, the 
railway stations overflowed, and the Thames em- 
bankment was covered. The " masses," I think, are 
usually an entertaining spectacle, even when observed 



rx.] AN ENGLISH EASTEK. 193 

through the distorting medium of London bad 
weather. There are indeed few things in their way 
more impressive than a dusky London holiday ; it 
suggests a variety of reflections. Even looked at 
superficially, the British capital is one of the most 
interesting of cities, and it is perhaps on such 
occasions as this that I have most felt its interest. 
London is ugly, dusky, dreary, more destitute than 
any European city of graceful and decorative inci- 
dent ; and though on festal days, like those I speak 
of, the populace is massed in large numbers at 
certain points, many of the streets are empty enough 
of human life to enable you to perceive their intrinsic 
want of charm. A Christmas-day or a Good Friday 
uncovers the ugliness of London. As you walk 
along the streets, having no fellow -pedestrians to 
look at, you look up at the brown brick house- walls, 
corroded with soot and fog, pierced with their straight 
stiff window-slits, and finished, by way of a cornice, 
with a little black line resembling a slice of curb- 
stone. There is not an accessory, not a touch of 
architectural fancy, not the narrowest concession to 
beauty. If I were a foreigner it would make me 
rabid ; being an Anglo-Saxon I find in it what 
Thackeray found in Baker Street — a delightful proof 
of English domestic virtue, of the sanctity of the 
British home. There are miles and miles of these 
edifying monuments, and it would seem that a city 
made up of them should have no claim to that 
larger effectiveness of which I just now spoke. 
London, however, is not made up of them ; there 
are architectural combinations of a statelier kind, 
and the impression moreover does not rest on details. 

o 



194 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [ix. 

London is pictorial in spite of details — from its dark- 
green, misty parks, the way the light comes down 
leaking and filtering from its cloud-ceiling, and the 
softness and richness of tone which objects put on 
in such an atmosphere as soon as they begin to 
recede. Nowhere is there such a play of light and 
shade, such a struggle of sun and smoke, such aerial 
gradations and confusions. To eyes addicted to such 
contemplations this is a constant diversion, and 
yet this is only part of it. What completes the effect 
of the place is its appeal to the feelings, made in so 
many ways, but made above all by agglomerated 
immensity. At any given point London looks huge; 
even in narrow corners you have a sense of its huge- 
ness, and petty places acquire a certain interest from 
their being parts of so mighty a whole. Nowhere 
else is so much human life gathered together, and 
nowhere does it press upon you with so many 
suggestions. These are not all of an exhilarating 
kind ; far from it. But they are of every possible 
kind, and that is the interest of London. Those 
that were most forcible during the showery Easter 
season were certain of the more perplexing and 
depressing ones ; but even with these was mingled 
a brighter strain. 

I walked down to "Westminster Abbey on Good 
Friday afternoon — walked from Piccadilly across the 
Green Park and through that of St. James. The 
parks were densely filled with the populace — the 
elder people shuffling about the walks and the poor 
little smutty-faced children sprawling over the dark 
damp turf. When I reached the Abbey I found a 
dense group of people about the entrance, but I 



ix.] AN ENGLISH EASTER. 195 

squeezed my way through them and succeeded in 
reaching the threshold. Beyond this it was impos- 
sible to advance, and I may add that it was not 
desirable. I put my. nose into the church and 
promptly withdrew it. The crowd was terribly 
compact; and beneath the gothic arches the odour 
was not that of incense. I slowly eliminated my- 
self, with that very modified sense of disappointment 
that one feels in London at being crowded out of a 
place. This is a frequent disappointment, for you 
very soon find out that there are, selfishly speaking, 
too many people. Human life is cheap ; your 
fellow-mortals are too numerous. Wherever you go 
you make the observation. Go to the theatre, to a 
concert, to an exhibition, to a reception; you always 
find that, before you arrive, there are people enough 
in the field. You are a tight fit in your place, wher- 
ever you find it ; you have too many companions 
and competitors. You feel yourself at times in 
danger of thinking meanly of the human personality; 
numerosity, as it were, swallows up quality, and per- 
petual association is rather irritating. This is the 
reason why the perfection of luxury in England is to 
own a "park" — an artificial solitude. To get one's 
self into the middle of a few hundred acres of oak- 
studded turf and to keep off the crowd by the breadth, 
at least, of this grassy cincture, is to enjoy a comfort 
which circumstances make peculiarly precious. But 
I walked back through the profane pleasure-grounds 
of London, in the midst of " superfluous herds," 
and I found that entertainment which I never fail 
to derive from a great English assemblage. The 
English are, to my eyes, so much the handsomest 



196 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [ix. 

people in Europe that it takes some effort of the 
imagination to believe that the fact requires proof. 
I never see a large number of them without feeling 
this impression confirmed ; though I hasten to add 
that I have sometimes felt it to be rather shaken 
in the presence of a limited group. I suspect that 
a great English crowd would yield a larger percent- 
age of handsome faces and figures than any other. 
With regard to the upper class I suppose this is 
generally granted ; but I should extend it to the 
whole people. Certainly, if the English populace 
strike the observer by their good looks, they must be 
very good-looking indeed. They are as ill-dressed 
as their betters are well-dressed, and their garments 
have that sooty-looking surface which has nothing 
in common with some of the more romantic forms 
of poverty. It is the hard prose of misery — an 
ugly and hopeless imitation of respectable attire. 
This is especially noticeable in the battered and be- 
draggled bonnets of the women, which look as if their 
husbands had stamped on them in hobnailed boots, 
as a hint of what is in store for their wearers. Then 
it is not too much to say that two-thirds of the 
London faces, among the " masses," bear in some 
degree or other the traces of alcoholic action. The 
proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive counten- 
ances is very striking ; and the ugliness of the sight 
is not diminished by the fact that many of the faces 
thus disfigured were evidently meant to please. A 
very large allowance is to be made, too, for the 
people who bear the distinctive stamp of that physi- 
cal and mental degradation which comes from the 
slums and purlieus of this dusky Babylon — the 



ix.] AN ENGLISH EASTER. 197 

pallid, stunted, misbegotten, and in every way miser- 
able figures. These people swarm in every London 
crowd, and I know of none in any other place that 
suggest an equal degree, of misery. But when these 
abatements are made, the observer is still liable to 
be struck by the frequency of well-moulded faces 
and bodies well put together ; of strong, straight 
brows and handsome mouths and noses, of rounded, 
finished chins and well-poised heads, of admirable 
complexions and well-disposed limbs. 

The capacity of an Englishwoman for being hand- 
some strikes me as absolutely unlimited, and even 
if (I repeat) it is in the luxurious class that it is 
most freely exercised, yet among the daughters of 
the people one sees a great many fine points. Among 
the men fine points are strikingly numerous — espe- 
cially among the younger ones. Here the same dis- 
tinction is to be made — the gentlemen are certainly 
handsomer than the vulgarians. But taking one 
young Englishman with another, they are physically 
very well turned out. Their features are finished, 
composed, as it were, more harmoniously than those 
of many of their nearer and remoter neighbours, and 
their figures are apt to be both powerful and com- 
pact. They present to view very much fewer acci- 
dental noses and inexpressive mouths, fewer sloping 
shoulders and ill-planted heads of hair, than their 
American kinsmen. Speaking always from the side- 
walk, it may be said that as the spring increases in 
London and the symptoms of the season multiply, 
the beautiful young men who adorn the West End 
pavements, and who advance before you in couples, 
arm-in-arm, fair-haired, gray- eyed, athletic, slow- 



198 POETKAITS OF PLACES. Lix. 

strolling, ambrosial, are among the most "brilliant 
features of the brilliant period. I have it at heart 
to add that if the English are handsomer than our- 
selves, they are also very much uglier. Indeed I 
think that all the European peoples are uglier than 
the American; we are far from producing those 
magnificent types of facial eccentricity which flourish 
among older civilisations. American ugliness is on 
the side of physical poverty and meanness ; English 
on that of redundancy and monstrosity. In America 
there are few grotesques ; in England there are many 
— and some of them have a high pictorial value. 



III. 

The element of the grotesque was very noticeable 
to me in the most striking collection of the shabbier 
English types that I had seen since I came to Lon- 
don. The occasion of my seeing them was the 
funeral of Mr. George Odger, which befell some four 
or five weeks before the Easter period. Mr. George 
Odger, it will be remembered, was an English radical 
agitator of humble origin, who had distinguished 
himself by a perverse desire to get into Parliament. 
He exercised, I believe, the useful profession of shoe- 
maker, and he knocked in vain at the door that 
opens but to the refined. But he was a useful and 
honourable man, and his own people gave him an 
honourable burial. I emerged accidentally into 
Piccadilly at the moment they were so engaged, and 
the spectacle was one I should have been sorry to 
miss. The crowd was enormous, but I managed to 
squeeze through it and to get into a hansom cab 



«.] AN ENGLISH EASTER. 199 

that was drawn up beside the pavement, and here I 
looked on as from a box at the play. Though it 
was a funeral that was going on I will not call it a 
tragedy; but it was a very serious comedy. The 
day happened to be magnificent — the finest of the 
year. The funeral had been taken in hand by the 
classes who are socially unrepresented in Parliament, 
and it had the character of a great popular " mani- 
festation." The hearse was followed by very few 
carriages, but the cortege of pedestrians stretched 
away in the sunshine, up and down the classic gen- 
tility of Piccadilly, on a scale that was highly im* 
pressive. Here and there the line was broken bj 
a small brass band — apparently one of those bands 
of itinerant Germans that play for coppers beneath 
lodging-house windows ; but for the rest it was com- 
pactly made up of what the newspapers call the 
dregs of the population. It was the London rabble, 
the metropolitan mob, men and women, boys and 
girls, the decent poor and the indecent, who had 
scrambled into the ranks as they gathered them up 
on their passage, and were making a sort of solemn 
"lark" of it. Very solemn it all was — perfectly 
proper and undemonstrative. They shuffled along 
in an interminable line, and as I looked at them out 
of the front of my hansom I seemed to be having a 
sort of panoramic view of the under side, the wrong 
side, of the London world. The procession was 
filled with figures which seemed never to have 
* shown out," as the English say, before ; of strange, 
pale, mouldy paupers who blinked and stumbled in 
the Piccadilly sunshine. I have no space to describe 
them more minutely, but I found the whole affair 



200 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [ix. 

rather suggestive. My impression rose not simply 
from the radical, or, as I may say for the sake of 
colour, the revolutionary, emanation of this dingy 
concourse, lighted up by the ironical sky; but from 
the same causes that I had observed a short time 
before, on the day the Queen went to open Parlia- 
ment, when in Trafalgar Square, looking straight 
down into Westminster and over the royal proces- 
sion, were gathered a group of banners and festoons 
inscribed in big staring letters with mottoes and 
sentiments which a sensitive police department might 
easily have found seditious. They were mostly in 
allusion to the Tichborne claimant, whose release 
from his dungeon they peremptorily demanded, and 
whose cruel fate was taken as a pretext for several 
sweeping reflections on the social arrangements of 
the time and country. These impertinent standards 
were allowed to sun themselves as freely as if they 
had been the manifestoes of the Irish Giant or the 
Oriental Dwarf at a fair. I had lately come from 
Paris, where the police-department is more sensitive, 
and where revolutionary placards are not observed 
to adorn the base of the obelisk in the Place de la 
Concorde. I was, therefore, the more struck on both 
of the occasions I speak of with the admirable Eng- 
lish practice of letting people alone — with the good 
sense and the good humour and even the good taste 
of it. It was this that I found impressive, as I 
watched the " manifestation" of Mr. Odger's under- 
fed partisans — the fact that the mighty mob could 
march along and do its errand, while the excellent 
quiet policemen stood by simply to see that the 
channel was kept clear and comfortable. 



ix.] AN ENGLISH EASTEE. 201 

When Easter Monday came it was obvious that 
every one (save Mr. Odger's friends — three or foui 
million or so) had gone out of town. There was 
hardly a pair of shutters in the "West End that was 
not closed ; there was not a bell that it was any use 
to pull.- The weather was detestable, the rain in- 
cessant, and the fact that all one's friends were away 
gave one plenty of leisure to reflect that the country 
must be the reverse of enlivening. But all one's 
friends had gone thither (this is the unanimity I 
began by talking about), and to restrict as much as 
possible the proportions of that game of hide-and- 
seek of which, at the best, so much of London social 
life consists, it seemed wise to bring within the 
limits of the dull season any such excursion as one 
might have projected in commemoration of the first 
days of spring. After due cogitation I paid a little 
visit to Canterbury and Dover, taking Eochester by 
the way, and it was of this momentous journey that 
I proposed, in beginning these remarks, to give an 
account. But I have dallied so much by the way 
that I have come almost to my rope's end without 
reaching my first stage. I should have begun, artis- 
tically, by relating that I put myself in the humour 
for remote adventure by going down the Thames on 
a penny steamboat to — the Tower. This was on 
the Saturday before Easter, and the City was as silent 
as the grave. The Tower was a memory of my 
childhood, and having a theory that from such mem- 
ories the dust of the ages had better not be shaken, 
I had not retraced my steps to its venerable walls. 
But the Tower is very good — much less cockneyned 
than I supposed it would seem to my maturer vision; 



202 PORTKAITS OF PLACES. [ix. 

very gray and historical, with the look that vivifies 
■ — rather lividly indeed — the past. I could not get 
into it, as it had been closed for Passion Week, but 
I was consequently relieved from the obligation to 
march about with a dozen fellow-starers in the train 
of a didactic beef-eater, and I strolled at will through 
the courts and the garden, sharing them only with 
the lounging soldiers of the garrison, who seemed to 
connect the place with important events. 

IV. 

At Eochester I stopped for the sake of its castle, 
which I espied from the railway-train, perched on a 
grassy bank beside the widening Medway. There 
were other reasons as well; the place has a small 
cathedral, and one has read about it in Dickens, 
whose house of Gadshill was a couple of miles from 
the town. All this Kentish country, between Lon- 
don and Dover, figures indeed repeatedly in Dickens ; 
he is to a certain extent, for our own time, the spirit 
of the land. I found this to be quite the case at 
Eochester. I had occasion to go into a little shop 
kept by a talkative old woman who had a photograph 
of Gadshill lying on her counter. This led to my 
asking her whether the illustrious master of the 
house often made his appearance in the town. "Oh, 
bless you, sir," she said, " we every one of us knew 
him to speak to. He was in this very shop on the 
Tuesday with a party of foreigners — as he was dead 
in his bed on the Friday." (I should remark that I 
probably do not repeat the days of the week as she 
gave them.) " He 'ad on his black velvet suit, and 



ix.] AN ENGLISH EASTER. 203 

it always made him look so 'andsome. I said to my 
'usband, ' I do think Charles Dickens looks so nice 
in that black velvet suit.' But he said he couldn't 
see as he looked any way particular. He was in 
this very shop on the Tuesday, with a party of 
foreigners." Eochester consists of little more than 
one long street, stretching away from the castle and 
the river toward neighbouring Chatham, and edged 
with low brick houses, of intensely provincial aspect, 
most of which have some small, dull quaintness of 
gable or window. Nearly opposite to the shop of 
the old lady with the dissentient husband is a little 
dwelling with an inscribed slab set into its face, 
which must often have provoked a smile in the great 
master of laughter. The slab relates that in the 
year 1579 Eichard Watts here established a charity 
which should furnish " six poor travellers, not rogues 
or proctors," one night's lodging and entertainment 
gratis, and four pence in the morning to go on their 
way withal, and that in memory of his " munificence " 
the stone has lately been renewed. The inn at 
Eochester was poor, and I felt strongly tempted to 
knock at the door of Mr. Watts's asylum, under plea 
of being neither a rogue nor a proctor. The poor 
traveller who avails himself of the testamentary four- 
pence may easily resume his journey as far as Chat- 
ham without breaking his treasure. Is not this the 
place where little Davy Copperfield slept under a 
cannon on his journey from London to Dover to 
join his aunt, Miss Trotwood ? The two towns are 
really but one, which forms an interminable crooked 
thoroughfare, lighted up in the dusk, as I measured 
it up and down, with the red coats of the vesper- 



204 PORTKAITS OF PLACES. [ix. 

tinal soldier quartered at the various barracks of 
Chatham. 

The cathedral of Eochester is small and plain, 
hidden away in rather an awkward corner, without 
a verdant close to set it off. It is dwarfed and 
effaced by the great square Norman keep of the 
adjacent castle. But within it is very charming, 
especially beyond the detestable wall, the vice of 
almost all the English cathedrals, which shuts in the 
choir and breaks the sacred perspective of the aisle. 
Here, as at Canterbury, you ascend a high range of 
steps, to pass through the small door in this wall. 
When I speak slightingly, by the way, of the outside 
of Eochester cathedral, I intend my faint praise in a 
relative sense. If we were so happy as to possess 
this inferior edifice in America, we should go bare- 
foot to see it ; but here it stands in the great shadow 
of Canterbury, and that makes it humble. I remem- 
ber, however, an old priory gateway which leads you 
to the church, out of the main street ; I remember a 
kind of haunted-looking deanery, if that be the 
technical name, at the base of the eastern walls ; I 
remember a fluted tower that took the afternoon 
light and let the rooks and the swallows come cir- 
cling and clamouring around it. Better than these 
things, however, I remember the ivy-draped mass of 
the castle — a very noble and imposing ruin. The 
old walled precinct has been converted into a little 
public garden, with flowers and benches, and a 
pavilion for a band, and the place was not empty, as 
such places in England never are. The result is 
agreeable, but I believe the process was barbarous, 
involving the destruction and dispersion of many 



IX.] AN ENGLISH EASTEE. 205 

interesting portions of the ruin. I sat there for a 
long time, however, looking in the fading light at 
what was left. This rugged pile of Norman masonry 
will be left when a great many solid things have 
departed ; it is a sort of satire on destruction or decay. 
Its walls are fantastically thick; their great time- 
bleached expanses and all their rounded roughnesses, 
their strange mixture of softness and grimness, hav> 
an undefinable fascination for the eye. Englisl 
ruins always come out peculiarly when the day be- 
gins to fail. Weather-bleached, as I say they are, 
they turn even paler in the twilight and grow con- 
sciously solemn and spectral. I have seen many a 
mouldering castle, but I remember in no single mass 
of ruin more of the helpless, amputated look. 

It is not the absence of a close that damages 
Canterbury; the cathedral stands amid grass and 
trees, with a cultivated margin all round it, and is 
placed in such a way that, as you pass out from 
under the gate-house, you appreciate immediately its 
grand feature — its extraordinary and magnificent 
length. None of the English cathedrals seems more 
beautifully isolated, more shut up to itself. It is a 
long walk, beneath the walls, from the gateway of the 
close to the farther end of the last chapel. Of all 
that there is to observe in this upward-gazing stroll 
I can give no detailed account ; I can speak only of 
the general impression. This is altogether delight- 
ful. None of the rivals of Canterbury has a more 
complicated and elaborate architecture, a more per- 
plexing intermixture of periods, a more charming 
jumble of Norman arches and English points and 
perpendiculars. What makes the side-view superb, 



206 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [ix. 

moreover, is the double transepts, which produce a 
fine agglomeration of gables and buttresses. It is 
as if two. great churches had joined forces toward the 
middle — one giving its nave and the other its choir, 
and each keeping its own great cross-aisles. Astride 
of the roof, between them, sits a huge gothic tower, 
which is one of the latest portions of the building, 
though it looks like one of the earliest, so crumbled 
and blunted and suffused is it by time and weather. 
Like the rest of the structure it has a magnificent 
colour — a sort of rich dull yellow, a something that 
is neither brown nor gray. This is particularly 
appreciable from the cloisters on the farther side of 
the church — the side, I mean, away from the town 
and the open garden-sweep I spoke of ; the side that 
looks toward a damp old clerical house, lurking be- 
hind a brown archway, through which you see young 
ladies in Gainsborough hats playing something on a 
patch of velvet turf ; the side, in short, that is some- 
how intermingled with a green quadrangle — a quad- 
rangle serving as a playground to a King's School, and 
adorned externally with a very precious and pictur- 
esque old fragment of Norman staircase. This clois- 
ters is not " kept up ;" it is very dusky and mouldy 
and dilapidated, and of course very sketchable. The 
old black arches and capitals are various and hand- 
some, and in the centre are tumbled together a group 
of crooked gravestones, themselves almost buried in 
the deep soft grass. Out of the cloisters opens the 
chapter-house, which is not kept up either, but which 
is none the less a magnificent structure ; a noble, 
lofty hall, with a beautiful wooden roof, simply 
arched like that of a tunnel, without columns or 



DC.] AN ENGLISH EASTER. 207 

"brackets. The place is now given up to dust and 
echoes; but it looks more like a banqueting -hall 
than a council-room of priests, and as you sit on the 
old wooden bench, which, raised on two or three 
steps, runs round the base of the four walls, you may 
gaze up and make out the faint ghostly traces of 
decorative paint and gold upon the brown ceiling. 
A little patch of this has been restored, " to give an 
idea." From one of the angles of the cloisters you 
are recommended by the verger to take a view of the 
great tower, which indeed detaches itself with tre- 
mendous effect. You see it base itself upon the 
roof as broadly as if it were striking roots in earth, 
and then pile itself away to a height which seems to 
make the very swallows dizzy, as they drop from the 
topmost shelf. Within the cathedral you hear a 
great deal, of course, about poor Thomas A'Becket, 
and the great sensation of the place is to stand on 
the particular spot where he was murdered and look 
down at a small fragmentary slab winch the verger 
points out to you as a bit of the pavement that 
caught the blood-drops of the struggle. It was late 
in the afternoon when I first entered the church; 
there had been a service in the choir, but that was 
well over, and I had the place to myself. The 
verger, who had some pushing-about of benches to 
attend to, turned me into the locked gates and left 
me to wander through the side-aisles of the choir 
and into the great chapel beyond it. I say I had 
the place to myself ; but it would be more decent to 
affirm that I shared it, in particular, with another 
gentleman. This personage was stretched upon a 
couch of stone, beneath a quaint old canopy of wood ; 



208 POKTRAITS OF PLACES. [ix. 

his hands were crossed upon his breast, and his 
pointed toes rested upon a little griffin or leopard. 
He was a very handsome fellow and the image of a 
gallant knight. His name was Edward Plantagenet, 
and his sobriquet was the Black Prince. "De la 
mort ne pensai-je mye," he says in the beautiful 
inscription embossed upon the bronze base of his 
image ; and I too, as I stood there, lost the sense of 
death in a momentary impression of personal near- 
ness to him. One had been farther off, after all, 
from other famous knights. In this same chapel for 
many a year stood the shrine of St. Thomas of Canter- 
bury, one of the richest and most potent in Christen- 
dom. The pavement which lay before it has kept 
its place, but Henry VIII. swept away everything 
else in his famous short cut to reform. Becket was 
originally buried in the crypt of the church ; his 
ashes lay there for fifty years, and it was only little 
by little that his martyrdom was, as the French say, 
" exploited." Then he was transplanted into the 
Lady Chapel ; every grain of his dust became a 
priceless relic, and the pavement was hollowed by 
the knees of pilgrims. It was on this errand of 
course that Chaucer's story-telling cavalcade came to 
Canterbury. I made my way down into the crypt, 
which is a magnificent maze of low, dark arches and 
pillars, and groped about till I found the place where 
the frightened monks had first shuffled the inanimate 
victim of Moreville and Fitzurse out of the reach of 
further desecration. While I stood there a violent 
thunderstorm broke over the cathedral; great rum- 
bling gusts and rain-drifts came sweeping through 
the open sides of the crypt, and, mingling with the 



ix.] AN ENGLISH EASTEK. 209 

darkness which seemed to deepen and flash in corners, 
and with the potent mouldy smell, made me feel as 
if I had descended into the very bowels of history. 
I emerged again, but the rain had settled down and 
spoiled the evening, and I splashed back to my inn 
and sat in an uncomfortable chair by the coffee-room 
fire, reading Dean Stanley's agreeable Memorials of 
Canterbury, and wondering over the musty appoint- 
ments and meagre resources of English hostels. 
This establishment had entitled itself (in compliment 
to the Black Prince, I suppose) the " Fleur-de-Lis." 
The name was very pretty (I had been foolish enough 
to let it attract me to the inn), but the lily was sadly 
deflowered. 



X. 

LONDON AT MIDSUMMER. 

1877 

I believe it is supposed to require a good deal of 
courage to confess that one has spent the month of 
August in London ; and I will therefore, taking the 
bull by the horns, plead guilty at the very outset to 
this dishonourable weakness. I might attempt some 
ingenious extenuation of it. I might say that my 
remaining in town had been the most unexpected 
necessity or the merest inadvertence ; I might pre- 
tend I liked it — that I had done it, in fact, for the 
love of the thing; I might claim that you don't 
really know the charms of London until on one of 
the dog-days you have imprinted your boot-sole in 
the slumbering dust of Belgravia, or, gazing along 
the empty vista of the Drive, in Hyde Park, have 
beheld, for almost the first time in England, a land- 
scape without figures. But little would remain of 
these specious apologies save the naked fact that I 
had distinctly failed to retire from the metropolis — 
either on the first of August with the ladies and 
children, or on the thirteenth with the members 
of Parliament, or on the twelfth when the grouse- 



X.] LONDON AT MIDSUMMER. 211 

shooting began. (I am not sure that I have got 
my dates right to a day, but these were about the 
proper opportunities.) I have, in fact, survived the 
departure of everything genteel, and the three 
millions of persons who remained behind with me 
have been witnesses of my shame. 

I cannot pretend, on the other hand, that, having 
lingered in town, I have found it a very odious or 
painful experience. Being a stranger, I have not 
felt it necessary to incarcerate myself during the 
day and steal abroad only under cover of the dark- 
ness — a line of conduct imposed by public opinion, 
if I am to trust the social criticism of the weekly 
papers (which I am far from doing), upon the native 
residents who allow themselves to be overtaken by 
the unfashionable season. I have indeed always 
had a theory that few things are pleasanter than 
during the hot weather to have a great city, and a 
large house within it, quite to one's self. 

These majestic conditions have not been combined 
in my own metropolitan sojourn, and I have received 
an impression that in London it would be rather 
difficult for a person not having the command of a 
good deal of powerful machinery to find them united. 
English summer weather is rarely hot enough to 
make it necessary to darken one's house and dis- 
robe. The present year has indeed in this respect 
been "exceptional," as any year is, for that matter, 
that one spends anywhere. But the manners of the 
people are, to American eyes, a sufficient indication 
that at the best (or the worst) even the highest 
flights of the thermometer in the British Islands 
betray a broken wing. People live with closed 



212 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [x. 

windows in August, very much as they do in 
January, and there is to the eye no appreciable 
difference in the character of their apparel. A 
" bath " in England, for the most part all the year 
round, means a little portable tin tub and a sponge. 
Peaches and pears, grapes and melons, are not a 
more obvious ornament of the market at midsummer 
than at Christmas. This matter of peaches and 
melons, by the way, offers one of the best examples 
of that fact to which a foreign commentator on 
English manners finds himself constantly recurring, 
and to which he grows at last almost ashamed of 
alluding — the fact that the beauty and luxury of 
the country — that elaborate system known and 
revered all over the world as " English comfort " — 
is a limited and restricted, an essentially private, 
affair. I am not one of those irreverent strangers 
who talk of English fruit as a rather audacious 
plaisanterie, though I could see very well what was 
meant a short time since by an anecdote related to 
me in a tone of contemptuous generalisation by a 
couple of my fellow -countrywomen. They had 
arrived in London in the dog-days, and, lunching at 
their hotel, had asked to be served with some fruit. 
The hotel was of the stateliest pattern, and they 
were waited upon by a functionary whose grandeur 
was proportionate. This gentleman bowed and 
retired, and, after a long delay reappearing, placed 
before them, with an inimitable gesture, a dish of 
gooseberries and currants. It appeared upon inves-' 
tigation that these acrid vegetables were the only 
things of succulence that the establishment could 
undertake to supply; and it seemed to increase the 



X.] LONDON AT MIDSUMMER. 213 

irony of the situation that the establishment was as 
near as possible to Buckingham Palace. I say that 
the heroines of my anecdote seemed disposed to 
generalise : this was sufficiently the case, I mean, to 
give me a pretext for assuring them that on a 
thousand charming estates the most beautiful 
peaches and melons were at that moment ripening 
under glass. My auditors tossed their heads, of 
course, at the beautiful estates and the glass ; and 
indeed at their ascetic hostelry close to Buckingham 
Palace such a piece of knowledge was but scantily 
consoling. 

It is to a more public fund of entertainment that 
the desultory stranger in any country chiefly appeals, 
especially in summer weather ; and as I have implied 
that there is little encouragement in England to such 
an appeal, it may appear remarkable that I should 
not have found London, at this season, at least as 
uncongenial as orthodoxy pronounces it. But one's 
liking for London — a stranger's liking at least — is 
at the best an anomalous and illogical sentiment, of 
which he may feel it hardly less difficult to give a 
categorical account at one time than at another. I 
am far from meaning by this that there are not in 
this mighty metropolis a thousand sources of interest, 
entertainment, and delight : what I mean is, that 
for one reason and another, with all its social 
resources, the place lies heavy on the foreign con- 
sciousness. It seems grim and dusky, fierce and 
unmerciful. And yet the foreign consciousness 
accepts it at last with an active satisfaction, and 
finds something warm and comfortable, something 
that if removed would be greatly missed, in its tre- 



214 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [x. 

mendous pressure. It must be admitted, however, 
that, granting that every one is out of town, your 
choice of pastimes is not embarrassing. If it has 
been your fortune to spend a certain amount of time 
in foreign cities, London will seem to you but 
slenderly provided with innocent diversions. This, 
indeed, brings us back simply to that question of 
the absence of a "public fund" of amusement to 
which reference was just now made. You must give 
up the idea of going to sit somewhere in the open 
air, to eat an ice and listen to a band of music. You 
will find neither the seat, the ice, „nor the band ; but, 
on the other hand, faithful to your profession of 
observant foreigner, you may supply the place of 
these delights by a little private meditation upon 
the deep-lying causes of the English indifference to 
them. In such reflections nothing is idle — every 
grain of testimony counts ; and one need therefore 
not be accused of jumping too suddenly from small 
things to great if one traces a connection between 
the absence of ices and music and the aristocratic 
constitution of English society. This aristocratic 
constitution of English society is the great and ever- 
present fact to the mind of a stranger: there is 
hardly a detail of English life that does not appear 
in some degree to point to it. It is really only in 
a country in which a good deal of democratic feeling 
prevails that people of " refinement," as we say in 
America, will be willing to sit at little round tables, 
on a pavement or a gravel-walk, at the door of a 
cafe\ The upper classes are too refined, and the 
lower classes are too miserable. One must hasten 
to add too, in justice, that the upper classes are, as 



X.] LONDON AT MIDSUMMEE. 215 

a general thing, quite too well furnished with enter- 
tainments of their own ; they have those special 
resources to which I alluded a moment since. They 
are people of fortune, and are naturally independent 
of communistic pleasures. If you can sit on a ter- 
race in a high-walled garden and have your ca/4 noir 
handed to you in Pompadour cups by servants in 
powder and plush, you have hardly a decent pretext 
for going to a public-house. In France and Italy, 
in Germany and Spain, the count and countess will 
sally forth and encamp for the evening, under a row 
of coloured lamps, upon the paving-stones, but it is 
ten to one that the count and countess live on a 
single floor, up several pair of stairs. They are, 
however, I think, not appreciably affected by con- 
siderations which operate potently in England. An 
Englishman who should propose to sit down at a 
caf^-door would find himself remembering that he is 
exposing himself to the danger of meeting his social 
inferiors. The danger is great, because his social 
inferiors are so numerous ; and I suspect that if we 
could look straight into the English consciousness 
we should be interested to find how serious a dan- 
ger it appears, and how good — given the texture of 
English life — are some of his reasons for wishing 
not to expose himself. 

The consideration of these reasons, however, would 
lead us very far from the potential little tables for 
ices in — where shall I say ? — in Oxford Street ; but, 
after all, there is no reason why our imagination 
should hover about these articles of furniture. I am 
afraid they would not strike us as happily situated. 
In such matters everything hangs together, and I 



216 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [x. 

am certain that the customs of the Boulevard dea 
Italiens and the Piazza Colonna would not harmonise 
with the scenery of the great London thoroughfare. 
A gin-palace right and left and a detachment of the 
London rabble in an admiring semicircle — these, I 
confess, strike me as some of the more obvioua 
features of the affair. Yet at the season of which 
I write, one's social studies must at the least be 
studies of low life, for wherever one may go for a 
stroll or to spend the summer afternoon, the un- 
fashionable side of things is uppermost. There is 
no one in the parks save the rough characters who 
are lying on their faces in the sheep-polluted grass. 
These people are always tolerably numerous in the 
Green Park, through which I frequently pass, and I 
never fail to drop a wondering glance upon them. 
But your wonder will go far if it begins to bestir 
itself on behalf of the recumbent British tramp. 
You perceive among them some rich possibilities. 
Their velveteen legs and their colossal high -lows, 
their purple necks and ear-tips, their knotted sticks 
and little greasy hats, make them look like stage- 
villains in a realistic melodrama. I may do them 
great injustice, but I always assume that they have 
had a taste of penal servitude — that they have paid 
the penalty of stamping on some weaker human 
head with those huge square heels that are turned 
up to the summer sky. But, actually, they are 
innocent enough, for they are sleeping as peacefully 
as the most accomplished philanthropist, and it is 
their look of having walked over half England, and 
of being confoundedly hungry and thirsty, that con- 
stitutes their romantic attractiveness. These six 



X.] LONDON AT MIDSUMMEK. 217 

square feet of brown grass are their present suffi- 
ciency ; but how long will they sleep, whither will 
they go next, and whence did they come last ? You 
permit yourself to wish that they might sleep for 
ever and go nowhere else at all. 

The month of August is so uncountenanced in 
London that going a few days since to Greenwich, 
that famous resort, I found it possible to get but 
half a dinner. The celebrated hotel had put out its 
stoves and locked up its pantry. But for this dis- 
covery I should have mentioned the little expedition 
to Greenwich as a charming relief to the monotony 
of a London August. Greenwich and Richmond 
are, classically, the two suburban dining-places. I 
know not how it may be at this time with Rich- 
mond, but the Greenwich incident brings me back 
(I hope not once too often) to the element of what 
has lately been called "particularism" in English 
pleasures. It was in obedience to a perfectly logical 
argument that the Greenwich hotel had, as I say, 
locked up its pantry. All well-bred people leave 
London after the first week in August, ergo those 
who remain behind are not well-bred, and cannot 
therefore rise to the conception of a " fish dinner." 
Why, then, should we have any tiling ready? I had 
other impressions, fortunately, of this interesting 
suburb, and I hasten to declare that during the period 
of good-breeding the dinner at Greenwich is the most 
amusing of all dinners. It begins with fish and it 
continues with fish: what it ends with — except songs 
and speeches and affectionate partings — I hesitate to 
affirm. It is a kind of mermaid reversed ; for I do 
know, in a vague way, that the tail of the creature is 



218 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [x. 

elaborately and interminably fleshy. If it were not 
grossly indiscreet, I should risk an allusion to the 
particular banquet which was the occasion of my 
becoming acquainted with the Greenwich cuisine. 
I would affirm that it is very pleasant to sit in a 
company of clever and distinguished men, before the 
large windows that look out upon the broad brown 
Thames. The ships swim by confidently, as if they 
were part of the entertainment and put down in the 
bill; the light of the afternoon fades ever so slowly. 
We eat all the fish of the sea, and wash them down 
with liquids that bear no resemblance to salt water. 
We partake of any number of those sauces with 
which, according to the French adage, one could 
swallow one's grandmother with a good conscience. 
To speak of the particular merits of my companions 
would indeed be indiscreet, but there is nothing 
indelicate in expressing a high appreciation of the 
frankness and robustness of English conviviality. 
The stranger — the American at least — who finds 
himself in the company of a number of Englishmen 
assembled for a convivial purpose becomes conscious 
of a certain indefinable and delectable something 
which, for want of a better . name, he will call their 
superior richness of temperament. He takes note 
of the liberal share of the individual in the magnifi- 
cent temperament of the people. This seems to 
him one of the finest things in the world, and his 
satisfaction will take a keener edge from such an 
incident as the single one I may permit myself to 
mention. It was one of those little incidents which 
can occur only in an old society — a society in which 
every one that a newly-arrived observer meets strikes 



X] LONDON AT MIDSUMMER 219 

him as having in some degree or other a sort of historic 
identity, being connected with some one or some- 
thing that he has heard of. If they are not the 
rose, they have lived more or less near it. There 
is an old English song-writer whom we all know 
and admire — whose songs are sung wherever the 
language is spoken. Of course, according to the 
law I just hinted at, one of the gentlemen sitting 
opposite must needs be his great-grandson. After 
dinner there are songs, and the gentleman trolls out 
one of his ancestral ditties with the most charming 
voice and the most finished art. 

I have still other memories of Greenwich, where 
there is a charming old park, on a summit of one of 
whose grassy undulations the famous observatory is 
perched. To do the thing completely, you must 
take passage upon one of the little grimy sixpenny 
steamers that ply upon the Thames, perform the 
journey by water, and then, disembarking, take a 
stroll in the park to get up an appetite for dinner. 
I find an irresistible charm in any sort of river- 
navigation, but I am rather at a loss how to speak 
of the little voyage from Westminster Bridge to 
Greenwich. It is in truth the most prosaic possible 
form of being afloat, and to be recommended rather 
to the inquiring than to the fastidious mind. It 
initiates you into the duskiness, the blackness, the 
crowdedness, the intensely commercial character of 
London. Few European cities have a finer river 
than the Thames, but none certainly has expended 
more ingenuity in producing an ugly river-front. 
Eor miles and miles you see nothing but the sooty 
backs of warehouses, or perhaps they are the sooty 



220 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [x. 

fronts: in buildings so very expressionless it is im- 
possible to distinguish. They stand massed together 
on the banks of the wide, turbid stream, which is 
fortunately of too opaque a quality to reflect the 
dismal image. A damp-looking, dirty blackness is 
the universal tone. The river is almost black, and 
is covered with black barges; above the black house- 
tops, from among the far-stretching docks and basins, 
rises a dusky wilderness of masts. The little puffing 
steamer is dingy and gritty — it belches a sable 
cloud that keeps you company as you go. In this 
carboniferous shower your companions, who belong 
chiefly, indeed, to the less brilliant classes, assume 
an harmonious grayness ; and the whole picture, 
glazed over with the glutinous London mist, becomes 
a masterly composition. But it is very impressive 
in spite of its want of lightness and brightness, and 
though it is ugly it is not insignificant. Like so 
many of the aspects of English civilisation that are 
untouched by elegance or grace, it has the merit of 
expressing something very serious. Viewed in this 
intellectual light, the polluted river, the sprawling 
barges, the dead -faced warehouses, the frowsy 
people, the atmospheric impurities, become richly 
suggestive. It sounds rather absurd to say so, but 
all this sordid detail reminds me of nothing less than 
the wealth and power of the British empire at large ; 
so that a kind of metaphysical magnificence hovers 
over the scene, and supplies what may be literally 
wanting. I don't exactly understand the associa- 
tion, but I know that when I look off to the left at 
the East India Docks, or pass under the dark, hugely- 
piled bridges, where the railway trains and the 



Xj LONDON AT MIDSUMMER. 221 

human processions are for ever moving, I feel a kind 
of imaginative thrill. The tremendous piers of the 
bridges, in especial, seem the very pillars of the 
British empire aforesaid. 

It is doubtless owing to this habit of obtrusive 
and unprofitable reverie that the sentimental tourist 
thinks it very fine to see the Greenwich observatory 
lifting its two modest little brick towers. The sight 
of this useful edifice gave me an amount of pleasure 
which may at first seem unreasonable. The reason 
was, simply, that I used to see it as a child, in 
woodcuts, in school-geographies, and in the corners 
of large maps which had a glazed, sallow surface, 
and which were suspended in unexpected places, in 
dark halls and behind doors. The maps were hung 
so high that my eyes could reach only to the lower 
corners, and these corners usually contained a print 
of a strange-looking house, standing among trees 
upon a grassy bank that swept down before it with 
the most engaging steepness. I used always to 
think that it must be an immense pleasure to hurl 
one's self down this curving precipice. Close at 
hand was usually something printed about something 
being at such and such a number of degrees " east 
of Greenwich." Why east of Greenwich ? The 
vague wonder that the childish mind felt on this 
point gave the place a mysterious importance, and 
seemed to put it into relation with the difficult and 
fascinating parts of geography — the countries of un- 
intentional outline and the lonely-looking pages of 
the atlas. Yet there it stood the other day, the 
precise point from which the great globe is measured; 
there was the plain little facade, with the old- 



222 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [x. 

fashioned cupolas ; there was the bank on which it 
would be so delightful not to be able to stop run- 
ning. It made me feel terribly old to find that I 
was not even tempted to begin. There are indeed 
a great many steep banks in Greenwich Park, which 
tumbles up and down in the most picturesque 
fashion. It is a charming place, rather shabby and 
footworn, as befits a strictly popular resort, but 
with a character all its own. It is filled with 
magnificent foreign-looking trees, of which I know 
nothing but that they have a vain appearance of 
being chestnuts, planted in long, convergent avenues, 
with trunks of extraordinary girth and limbs that fling 
a dusky shadow far over the grass ; there are plenty 
of benches, and there are deer as tame as sleepy 
children ; and from the tops of the bosky hillocks 
there are views of the widening Thames, and the 
moving ships, and the two classic inns by the water- 
side, and the great pompous buildings, designed by 
Inigo Jones, of the old Hospital, which have been 
despoiled of their ancient pensioners and converted 
into a kind of naval academy. 

Taking note of all this, I arrived at a far-away 
angle in the wall of the park, where a little postern 
door stood ajar. I pushed the door open, and found 
myself, by a picturesque transition, upon Black- 
heath Common. One had often heard of Black- 
heath: well, here it was — a great green, breezy 
place, where various lads in corduroys were playing 
cricket. I always admire an English common ; 
it may be curtailed and cockneyfied, as this one was 
— which had lamp -posts stuck about on its turf 
and a fresh-painted banister all around — but it is 



X.] LONDON AT MIDSUMMEK. 223 

sure to be one of the places that remind you vividly 
that you are in England. Even if the turf is too 
much trodden, there is, to foreign eyes, an English 
greenness about it, and there is something peculiarly 
insular in the way the high-piled, weather-bearing 
clouds hang over it and drizzle down their gray 
light. Still further to identify this spot, here was 
the British soldier emerging from two or three of 
the roads, with his cap upon his ear, his white 
gloves in one hand and his foppish little cane in 
the other. He wore the uniform of the artillery, 
and I asked him where he had come from. I 
learned that he had walked over from Woolwich, 
and that this feat might be accomplished in half an 
hour. Inspired again by vague associations, I pro- 
ceeded to accomplish its equivalent. I bent my 
steps to Woolwich, a place which I knew, in a 
general way, to be a nursery of British valour. At 
the end of my half hour I emerged upon another 
common, where local colour was still more intense. 
The scene was very entertaining. The open grassy 
expanse was immense, and, the evening being beauti- 
ful, it was dotted with strolling soldiers and towns- 
folk. There were half a dozen cricket matches, 
both civil and military. At one end of this peace- 
ful campus martins, which stretches over a hilltop, 
rises an interminable facade — one of the fronts of 
the artillery barracks. It has a very honourable 
air, and more windows and doors, I imagine, than 
any building in Britain. There is a great clean 
parade before it, and there are many sentinels pac- 
ing in front of neatly-kept places of ingress to officers' 
quarters. Everything it looks out upon is military 



224 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [x. 

— the distinguished college (where the poor young 
man whom it would perhaps be premature to call 
the last of the Bonapartes lately studied the art of 
war) on one side ; a sort of model camp — a collection 
of the tidiest plank huts — on the other ; a hospital, 
on a well-ventilated site, at the remoter end. And 
then in the town below there are a great many more 
military matters — barracks on an immense scale; 
a dockyard that presents an interminable dead wall 
to the street ; an arsenal which the gatekeeper (who 
refused to admit me) declared to be " five miles " in 
circumference ; and, lastly, grogshops enough to 
inflame the most craven spirit. These latter in- 
stitutions I glanced at on my way to the railway 
station at the bottom of the hill; but before depart- 
ing I had spent half an hour in strolling about the 
common in vague consciousness of certain emotions 
that are called into play (I speak but for myself) 
by almost any glimpse of the imperial machinery of 
this great country. The glimpse may be of the 
slightest ; it stirs a peculiar sentiment. I know not 
what to call this sentiment unless it be simply an 
admiration for the greatness of England. The great- 
ness of England ; that is a very off-hand phrase, and 
of course I don't pretend to use it analytically. I 
use it sentimentally — as it sounds in the ears of any 
American who finds in English history the sacred 
source of his own national affection. I think of the 
great part that England has played in human affairs, 
the great space she has occupied, her tremendous 
might, her far-stretching sway. That these clumsily - 
general ideas should be suggested by the sight of 
some infinitesimal fraction of the English adminis- 



X.] LONDON AT MIDSUMMER. 225 

trative system may seem to indicate a cast of fancy 
too hysterical ; but if so, I must plead guilty to 
the weakness. Why should a sentry-box more or 
less set one thinking of the glory of this little island, 
which has found in her bosom the means of so vast 
a dominion? This is more than I can say; and all 
I shall attempt to say is, that in the difficult days 
that are now elapsing a sympathetic stranger finds 
his meditations singularly quickened. It is the 
dramatic element in English history that he has 
chiefly cared for, and he finds himself wondering 
whether the dramatic epoch is completely closed. 
It is a moment when all the nations of Europe 
seem to be doing something, and he waits to see 
what England, who has done so much, will do. He 
has been meeting of late a good many of his country- 
people — Americans who live on the Continent and 
pretend to speak with assurance of continental ways 
of feeling. These people have been passing through 
London, and many of them are in that irritated con- 
dition of mind which appears to be the portion of 
the American sojourner in the British metropolis 
when he is not given up to the delights of the historic 
sentiment. They have affirmed with emphasis that 
the continental nations have ceased to care a straw 
for what England thinks, that her traditional prestige 
is completely extinct, and that the affairs of Europe 
will be settled quite independently of the power 
whose capital is on the Thames. England will do 
nothing, will risk nothing ; there is no cause bad 
enough for her not to find a selfish interest in it — 
there is no cause good enough for her to fight about 
it. Poor old England is exploded ; it is about time 

Q 



226 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [x. 

she should haul in her nets. To all this the sym- 
pathetic stranger replies that, in the first place, he 
doesn't believe a word of it; and, in the second 
place, he doesn't care a fig for it — care, that is, what 
the continental nations think. If the greatness of 
England were really waning, it would be to him as 
a personal grief; and as he strolls about the breezy 
common of "Woolwich, with all those mementoes of 
British dominion around him, he is quite too keenly 
exhilarated to be distracted by such vapours. 

He wishes, nevertheless, as I said before, that 
England would do something — something striking 
and powerful, which should be at once characteristic 
and unexpected. He asks himself what she can do, 
and he remembers that this greatness of England 
which he so much admires was formerly much ex- 
emplified in her " taking " something. Can't she 
" take " something now ? There is the Spectator, 
who wants her to occupy Egypt : can't she occupy 
Egypt ? The Spectator considers this her moral 
duty — inquires even whether she has a right not 
to bestow the blessings of her beneficent rule upon 
the down-trodden Fellaheen. I found myself in 
company with an acute young Frenchman a day or 
two after this eloquent plea for a partial annexation 
of the Nile had appeared in the most ingenious of 
journals. Some allusion was made to it, and my 
companion proceeded to pronounce it a finished 
example of British hypocrisy. I don't know how 
powerful a defence I made of it, but while I read 
it I certainly had been carried away by it. I 
recalled it while I pursued my contemplations, but 
I recalled at the same time that sadly prosaic speech 



x.] LONDON AT MIDSUMMER 227 

of Mr. Gladstone's to which it had been a reply. 
Mr. Gladstone had said that England had much 
more urgent duties than the occupation of Egypt : 

she had to attend to the great questions of- 

What were the great questions ? Those of local 
taxation" and the liquor-laws ! Local taxation and 
the liquor - laws ! The phrase, to my ears, just 
then made a painful discord. These were not the 
things I had been thinking of; it was not as she 
should bend anxiously over these doubtless inter- 
esting subjects that the sympathetic stranger would 
seem to see England in his favourite posture — that, 
as Macaulay says, of hurling defiance at her foes. 
Of course, Mr. Gladstone was probably right, but 
Mr. Gladstone was not a sympathetic stranger. 



XI. 

TWO EXCUKSIONS. 

1877. 



They differed greatly from each other, hut each had 
an interest of its own. There seemed (as regards 
the first) a general consensus of opinion as to its 
being a great pity that a stranger in England should 
miss the Derby day. Every one assured me that 
this was the great festival of the English people, 
and the most characteristic of national holidays. 
So much, since it had to do with horse-flesh, I could 
readily believe. Had not the newspapers been 
filled for weeks with recurrent dissertations upon 
the animals concerned in the ceremony? and was 
not the event, to the nation at large, only imper- 
ceptibly less momentous than the other great 
question of the day — the fate of empires and the 
reapportionment of the East ? The space allotted 
to sporting intelligence in a compact, eclectic, " intel- 
lectual" journal like the Pall Mall Gazette, had 
seemed to me for some time past a measure of the 
hold of such questions upon the British mind. 



XI.] TWO EXCURSIONS. 229 

These things, however, are very natural in a country 
in which in " society " you are liable to make the 
acquaintance of some such syllogism as the following. 
You are seated at dinner next a foreign lady, who 
has on her other hand a native gentleman, by whom 
she is being instructed in the art of getting the 
right point-of-view for looking at English life. I 
profit by their conversation, and I learn that this 
point-of-view is apparently the saddle. "You see, 
English life," says the gentleman, " is really English 
country life. It's the country that is the basis of 
English society. And you see, country life is — 
well, it's the hunting. It's the hunting that is at 
the bottom of it all." In other words, " the hunting " 
is the basis of English society. Duly initiated into 
this interpretation of things, the American observer 
is prepared for the colossal proportions of the annual 
pilgrimage to Epsom. This pilgrimage, however, I 
was assured, though still well worth taking part in, 
is by no means so characteristic as in former days. 
It is now performed in a large measure by rail, and 
the spectacle on the road has lost its ancient bril- 
liancy. The road has been given up more and 
more to the populace and the strangers, and has 
ceased to be graced by the presence of ladies. 
Nevertheless, as a man and a stranger, I was 
strongly recommended to take it ; for the return 
from the Derby is still, with all its abatements, a 
classic spectacle. 

I mounted upon a four-horse coach, a charming 
coach, with a yellow body, and handsome, clean- 
flanked leaders ; placing myself beside the coachman, 
as I had been told this was the point of vantage. 



230 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xl 

The coach was one of the vehicles of the new 
fashion — the fashion of public conveyances driven, 
for the entertainment of themselves and of the 
public, by gentlemen of leisure. On the Derby 
day all the coaches that start from the classic head- 
quarters — the "White Horse," in Piccadilly — and 
stretch away from London toward a dozen different 
and well-selected goals, had been dedicated to the 
Epsom road. The body of the vehicle is empty, as 
no one thinks of occupying any but one of the thir- 
teen places on the top. On the Derby day, however, 
a properly laden coach carries a company of hampers 
and champagne-baskets in its inside places. I must 
add that on this occasion my companion was by ex- 
ception a professional whip, who proved an enter- 
taining cicerone. Other companions there were, 
perched in the twelve places behind me, whose social 
quality I made less of a point of testing — though 
in the course of the expedition their various char- 
acteristics, under the influence of champagne, ex- 
panded so freely as greatly to facilitate the operation. 
We were a society of exotics — Spaniards, French- 
men, Germans. There were only two Britons, and 
these, according to my theory, were Australians — 
an antipodal bride and groom, on a centripetal 
wedding-tour. 

The drive to Epsom, when you get well out of 
London, is sufficiently pretty; but the part of it 
which most took my fancy was a suburban district 
— the classic neighbourhood of Clapham. The 
vision of Clapham had been a part of the furniture 
of my imagination — the vision of its respectable 
common, its evangelical society, and its goodly brick 



H.] TWO EXCURSIONS. 231 

mansions of the Georgian era. I now beheld these 
objects for the first time, and I thought them very 
charming. This epithet, indeed, scarcely applies to 
the evangelical society, which naturally, on the 
morning of the Derby day, and during the desecrat- 
ing progress of the Epsom revellers, was not much 
in the foreground. But all around the verdant, if 
cockneyfied common, are ranged commodious houses 
of a sober red complexion, from under whose neo- 
classic pediments you expect to see a mild-faced lady 
emerge — a lady in a cottage -bonnet and mittens, 
distributing tracts from a little satchel. It would 
take an energetic piety, however, to stem the current 
of heterogeneous vehicles which at about this point 
takes up its metropolitan affluents and bears them 
in its rumbling, rattling tide. The concourse of 
wheeled conveyances of every possible order here 
becomes dense, and the spectacle from the top of the 
coach proportionately absorbing. You begin to per- 
ceive that the brilliancy of the road has in truth 
departed, and that well-appointed elegance is not the 
prevailing characteristic. But when once you have 
grasped this fact your entertainment is continuous. 
You perceive that you are " in," as the phrase is, for 
something vulgar, something colossally, unimagin- 
ably, heroically vulgar; all that is necessary is to 
accept this situation and look out for illustrations. 
Beside you, before you, behind you, is the mighty 
London populace, taking its 6bats. You get for the 
first time a notion of the London population at large. 
It has piled itself into carts, into omnibuses, into 
every possible and impossible species of " trap." A 
large proportion of it is of course on foot, trudging 



232 POKTRAITS OF PLACES. [xl 

aiong the perilous margin of the middle way, in such 
comfort as may be gathered from fifteen miles' dodg- 
ing of broken shins. The smaller the vehicle, the 
more rat-like the animal that drags it, the more 
numerous and ponderous its human freight ; and as 
every one is nursing in his lap a parcel of provender 
as big as himself, wrapped in ragged newspapers, it 
is not surprising that roadside halts are frequent, 
and that the taverns all the way to Epsom (it is 
wonderful how many there are) are encompassed by 
dense groups of dusty pilgrims, indulging liberally 
in refreshment for man and beast. And when I say 
man I must by no means be understood to exclude 
woman. The female contingent on the Derby day 
is not the least remarkable part of the London mul- 
titude. Every one is. prepared for an " outing," but 
the women are even more brilliantly and resolutely 
prepared than the men ; it is the best possible chance 
to observe the various types of the British female of 
the lower orders. The lady in question is usually 
not ornamental. She is useful, robust, prolific, ex- 
cellently fitted to play the somewhat arduous part 
allotted to her in the great scheme of English civili- 
sation. But she has not those graces which enable 
her to become easily and harmoniously festal. On 
smaller holidays — or on simple working-days — in 
London crowds, I have often thought her handsome ; 
thought, that is, that she has handsome points, 
and that it was not impossible to see how it is that 
she helps to make the English race, on the whole, 
the comeliest in the world. But at Epsom she is 
too stout, too hot, too red, too thirsty, too boisterous, 
too strangely accoutred. And yet I wish to do her 



XI.] TWO EXCURSIONS. 233 

justice ; so I must add that if there is something to 
winch an American cannot refuse a tribute of ad- 
miration in the gross plebeian jollity of the Derby 
day, it is not evident why these lusty she-revellers 
should not get part of the credit of it. The striking 
tiling, the interesting thing, both on the outward 
drive and on the return, was that the holiday was 
so frankly, heartily, good-humoureclly taken. The 
people that of all peoples is habitually the most 
governed by decencies, proprieties, rigidities of con- 
duct, was, for one happy day, unbuttoning its re- 
spectable straight-jacket and letting its powerful, 
carnal, healthy temperament take the air. In such 
a spectacle there was inevitably much that was un- 
lucky and unprofitable ; these things came upper- 
most chiefly on the return, when demoralisation was 
supreme, when the temperament in question had 
quite taken what the French call the key of the 
fields, and seemed in no mood to come back and give 
an account of itself. For the rest, to be dressed 
with a kind of brutal gaudiness, to be very thirsty 
and violently flushed, to laugh perpetually at every- 
thing and at nothing, thoroughly to enjoy, in short, 
a momentous occasion — all this is not, in simple 
persons of the more susceptible sex, an unpardonable 
crime. 

The course at Epsom is in itself very pretty, and 
disposed by nature herself in sympathetic prevision 
of the sporting passion. It is something like the 
crater of a volcano, without the mountain. The 
outer rim is the course proper ; the space within it 
is a vast, shallow, grassy concavity in which vehicles 
are drawn up and beasts tethered, and in which the 



234 POETRAITS OF PLACES. [xi. 

greater part of the multitude — the mountebanks, 
the betting-men, and the myriad hangers-on of the 
scene — are congregated. The outer margin of the 
uplifted rim in question is occupied by the grand 
stand, the small stands, the paddock. The day 
was exceptionally beautiful ; the charming sky was 
spotted over with little idle-looking, loafing, irre- 
sponsible clouds ; the Epsom Downs went swelling 
away as greenly as in a coloured sporting-print, and 
the wooded uplands, in the middle distance, looked 
as innocent and pastoral as if they had never seen 
a policeman or a rowdy. The crowd that spread 
itself over this immense expanse was the richest re- 
presentation of human life that I have ever looked 
upon. One's first fate after arriving, if one is perched 
upon a coach, is to see the coach guided, by means 
best known to the coachman himself, through the 
tremendous press of vehicles and pedestrians, intro- 
duced into a precinct roped off and guarded from 
intrusion save under payment of a fee, and then 
drawn up alongside of the course, as nearly as 
possible opposite the grand stand and the win- 
ning post. Here you have only to stand up in 
your place — on tiptoe, it is true, and with a good 
deal of stretching — to see the race fairly well. 
But I hasten to add that seeing the race is indif- 
ferent entertainment. If I might be Irish on the 
occasion of a frolic, I would say that in the first 
place you do not see it at all, and in the second 
place you perceive it to be not much worth the 
seeing. It may be very fine in quality, but in 
quantity it is inappreciable. The horses and their 
jockeys first go dandling and cantering along the 



XI.] TWO EXCUESIONS.. 235 

course to the starting-point, looking as insubstantial 
as sifted sunbeams. Then there is a long wait, 
during which, of the sixty thousand people present 
(my figures are imaginary) thirty thousand affirm 
positively that they have started, and thirty thousand 
as positively deny it. Then the whole sixty thousand 
are suddenly resolved into unanimity by the sight 
of a dozen small jockey-heads whizzing along a 
very distant sky-line. In a shorter space of time 
than it takes me to write it, the whole thing is 
before you, and for the instant it is anything but 
beautiful. A dozen furiously revolving arms — 
pink, green, orange, scarlet, white — whacking the 
flanks of as many straining steeds ; a glimpse of 
this, and the spectacle is over. The spectacle, how- 
ever, is of course an infinitesimally small part of 
the purpose of Epsom and the interest of the Derby. 
The interest is in having money in the affair, and 
doubtless those most interested do not trouble them- 
selves particularly to watch the race. They learn 
soon enough whether they are, in the English 
phrase, to the good or to the bad. 

When the Derby stakes had been carried off by 
a horse of which I confess I am barbarous enough 
to have forgotten the name, I turned my back to 
the running, for all the world as if I too were largely 
" interested," and sought entertainment in looking 
at the crowd. The crowd was very animated ; that 
is the most succinct description I can give of it. 
The horses of course had been removed from the 
vehicles, so that the pedestrians were free to surge 
against the wheels and even to a certain extent to 
scale and overrun the carriages. This tendency 



236 POBTEAITS OF PLACES. [xi. 

became most pronounced when, as the mid-period 
of the day was reached, the process of lunching 
began to unfold itself and every coach-top to become 
the scene of a picnic. From this moment, at the 
Derby, demoralisation begins. I was in a position 
to observe it, all around me, in the most character- 
istic forms. The whole affair, as regards the con- 
ventional rigidities I spoke of a while since, becomes 
a real degringolade. The shabbier pedestrians bustle 
about the vehicles, staring up at the lucky mortals 
who are perched in a kind of tormentingly near 
empyrean — a region in which dishes of lobster-salad 
are passed about and champagne-corks cleave the 
air like celestial meteors. There are nigger-minstrels 
and beggars and mountebanks and spangled persons 
on stilts, and gipsy matrons, as genuine as possible, 
with glowing Oriental eyes and dropping their tis ; 
these last offer you for sixpence the promise of every- 
thing genteel in life except the aspirate. On a coach 
drawn up beside the one on which I had a place, a' 
party of opulent young men were passing from one 
stage of exhilaration to another with a punctuality 
which excited my admiration. They were accom- 
panied by two or three young ladies of the kind 
that usually shares the choicest pleasures of youth- 
ful British opulence — young ladies in whom nothing 
has been neglected that can make a complexion 
Titianesque. The whole party had been drinking 
deep, and one of ,the young men, a pretty lad of 
twenty, had in an indiscreet moment staggered down 
as best he could to the ground. Here his cups 
proved too many for him, and he collapsed and 
rolled over. In plain English, he was beastly 



XI.] TWO EXCURSIONS. 237 

drunk, It was the scene that followed that arrested 
my observation. His companions on the top of the 
coach called down to the people herding under the 
wheels to pick him up and put him away inside. 
These people were the grimiest of the rabble, and a 
couple of men who looked like coal-heavers out of 
work undertook to handle this hapless youth. But 
their task was difficult; it was impossible to imagine 
a young man more drunk. He was a mere bag of 
liquor — at once too ponderous and too flaccid to be 
lifted. He lay in a helpless heap under the feet of 
the crowd — the best intoxicated young man in 
England. His extemporised chamberlains took him 
first in one way and then in another; but he was 
like water in a sieve. The crowd hustled over 
him ; every one wanted to see ; he was pulled and 
shoved and fumbled. The spectacle had a grotesque 
side, and this it was that seemed to strike the 
fancy of the young man's comrades. They had not 
done lunching, so they were unable to bestow upon 
the incident the whole of that consideration which 
its high comicality deserved. But they did what 
they could. They looked down very often, glass in 
hand, during the half-hour that it went on, and they 
stinted neither their generous, joyous laughter, nor 
their appreciative comments. Women are said to 
have no sense of humour ; but the Titianesque 
young ladies did liberal justice to the pleasantry of 
the scene. Toward the last, indeed, their attention 
rather flagged ; for even the best joke suffers by 
reiteration, and when you have seen a stupefied 
young man, infinitely bedusted, slip out of the 
embrace of a couple of clumsy paupers for the 



238 PORTEAITS OF PLACES. [xi. 

twentieth time, you may very properly suppose 
that you have arrived at the farthest limits of the 
ludicrous. 

After the great race had been run I quitted my 
perch and spent the rest of the afternoon in wander- 
ing about that grassy concave I have mentioned. It 
was amusing and picturesque ; it was like a huge 
Bohemian encampment. Here also a great number 
of carriages were stationed, freighted in like manner 
with free-handed youths and young ladies with 
gilded tresses. These young ladies were almost the 
only representatives of their sex with pretensions 
to elegance ; they were often pretty and always ex 
hilarated. Gentlemen in pairs, mounted on stools, 
habited in fantastic sporting garments, and offering 
bets to whomsoever listed, were a conspicuous 
feature of the scene. It was equally striking that 
they were not preaching in the desert and that they 
found plenty of patrons among the baser sort. I 
returned to my place in time to assist at the rather v 
complicated operation of starting for the drive back 
to London. Putting in horses and getting vehicles 
into line seemed in the midst of the general crush 
and entanglement a process not to be facilitated 
even by the most liberal swearing on the part of 
those engaged in it. But little by little we came 
to the end of it ; and as by this time a kind of 
mellow cheerfulness pervaded the upper atmosphere 
— the region of the perpendicular whip — even those 
interruptions most trying to patience were somehow 
made to minister to jollity. It was for people 
below to not get trampled to death or crunched 
between opposing wheel-hubs, if they could manage 



XI.] TWO EXCUKSIONS. 239 

it. Above, the carnival of " chaff " had set in, and 
it deepened as the lock of vehicles grew denser. 
As they were all locked together (with a comfort- 
able padding of pedestrians at points of acutest 
contact), they contrived somehow to move together; 
so that we gradually got away and into the road. 
The four or five hours consumed on the road were 
simply as I say, a carnival of " chaff," the profusely 
good-humoured savour of which, on the whole, was 
certainly striking. The chaff was not brilliant nor 
subtle nor especially graceful ; and here and there 
it was quite too tipsy to be even articulate. But 
as an expression of that unbuttoning of the popular 
straight-jacket of which I spoke awhile since, it 
had its wholesome and even innocent side. It 
took, indeed, frequently an importunate physical 
form ; it sought emphasis in the use of pea-shooters 
and water-squirts. At its best, too, it was extremely 
low and rowdyish. But a stranger even of the most 
refined tastes might be glad to have a glimpse of this 
popular revel, for it would make him feel that he was 
learning something more about the English people. 
It would give a meaning to the old words " merry 
England." It would remind him that the natives 
of that country are subject to some of the most 
frolicsome of the human passions, and that the 
decent, dusky vistas of the London residential streets 
— those discreet creations of which Thackeray's 
"Baker Street" is the type — are not a complete 
symbol of the complicated race that erected them. 



240 POKTKAITS OF PLACES. [xi, 



II. 



It seemed to me such a piece of good fortune to 
have been asked down to Oxford at Commemoration 
by a gentleman implicated in the remarkable cere- 
mony which goes on under that name, who kindly 
offered me the hospitality of his college, that I 
scarcely waited even to thank him — I simply 
took the first train. I had had a glimpse of 
Oxford in former years, but I had never slept in 
a low-browed room looking out on a grassy quad- 
rangle, opposite a mediaeval clock-tower. This 
satisfaction was vouchsafed me on the night of my 
arrival; I was inducted into the rooms of an absent 
undergraduate. I sat in his deep arm-chairs ; I 
burned his candles and read his books. I hereby 
thank him as tenderly as possible. Before going 
to bed I took a turn through the streets and^ 
renewed in the silent darkness that impression of 
the charm imparted to them by the quiet college- 
fronts, which I had gathered in former years. The 
college-fronts were now quieter than ever, the 
streets were empty, and the old scholastic city was 
sleeping in the warm starlight. The undergraduates 
had retired in large numbers, encouraged in this 
impulse by the collegiate authorities, who deprecate 
their presence at Commemoration. However many 
young gownsmen may be sent away, there always 
remain enough to make a noise. There can be no 
better indication of the resources of Oxford in a 
spectacular way than this fact that the first step 



XI.] TWO EXCURSIONS. 241 

toward preparing an impressive ceremony is to get 
rid of the undergraduates. 

In the morning I breakfasted with a young 
American who, in common with a number of his 
countrymen, had come hither to seek stimulus for 
a finer -quality of study. I know not whether 
he would have reckoned as such stimulus the con- 
versation of a couple of those ingenuous youths of 
Britain whose society I always find charming ; but 
it added, from my own point of view, to the local 
colour of the entertainment. After this was over I 
repaired, in company with a crowd of ladies and 
elderly people, interspersed with gownsmen, to the 
hoary rotunda of the Sheldonian theatre, which every 
visitor to Oxford will remember, with its curious 
cincture of clumsily-carven heads of warriors and 
sages perched upon stone posts. The interior of this 
edifice is the scene of the classic hooting, stamping, 
and cat-calling by which the undergraduates confer 
the last consecration upon the distinguished gentle- 
men who come up for the honorary degree of D.C.L. 
It is with the design of attenuating as much as pos- 
sible this incongruous chorus, that the heads of 
colleges, on the close of the term, a few days before 
Commemoration, speed their too demonstrative dis- 
ciples upon the homeward way. As I have already 
hinted, however, the contingent of irreverent lads 
was on this occasion quite large enough to produce 
a very handsome specimen of the traditional rumpus. 
This made the scene a very singular one. An 
American of course, with his fondness for antiquity, 
his relish for picturesqueness, his " emotional " atti- 
tude at historic shrines, takes Oxford much more 

R 



242 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xl 

seriously than its customary denizens can be expected 
to do. These people are not always upon the high 
horse; they are not always in an acutely sentient 
condition. Nevertheless, there is a certain maxi- 
mum of disaccord with their beautiful circumstances 
which the ecstatic Occidental vaguely expects them 
not to transcend. No effort of the intellect before- 
hand would enable him to imagine one of those 
silver-gray temples of learning converted into a sem- 
blance of the Bowery Theatre when the Bowery 
Theatre is being trifled with. 

The Sheldonian edifice, like everything at Ox- 
ford, is more or less monumental. There is a double 
tier of galleries, with sculptured pulpits protruding 
from them ; there are full-length portraits of kings 
and worthies ; there is a general air of antiquity and 
dignity, which, on the occasion of which I speak, 
was enhanced by the presence of certain ancient 
scholars, seated in crimson robes in high-backed 
chairs. Formerly, I believe, the undergraduates 
were placed apart — packed together in a corner of 
one of the galleries. But now they are scattered 
among the general spectators, a large number of 
whom are ladies. They muster in especial force, 
however, on the floor of the theatre, which has been 
cleared of its benches. Here the dense mass is at 
last severed in twain by the entrance of the prospec- 
tive D.C.L.'s walking in single file, clad in crimson 
gowns, preceded by mace-bearers and accompanied 
by the Eegius professor of Civil Law, who presents 
them individually to the Vice-Chancellor of the 
university, in a Latin speech which is of course a 
glowing eulogy. The five gentlemen to whom this 



XI.] TWO EXCURSIONS. 243 

distinction had been offered in 1877 were not among 
those whom fame has trumpeted most loudly ; but 
there was something very pretty in their standing in 
their honourable robes, ..with heads modestly bent, 
while the orator, equally brilliant in aspect, recited 
their titles sonorously to the venerable dignitary in 
the high-backed chair. Each of them, when the 
little speech is ended, ascends the steps leading to 
the chair; the Vice-Chancellor bends forward and 
shakes his hand, and the new D.C.L. goes and sits 
in the blushing row of his fellow-doctors. The im- 
pressiveness of all this is much diminished by the 
boisterous conduct of the collegians, who super- 
abound in extravagant applause, in impertinent in- 
terrogation, and in lively disparagement of the 
orator's Latinity. Of the scene that precedes the 
episode I have just described I have given no ac- 
count; vivid portrayal of it is not easy. Like the 
return from the Derby, it is a carnival of "chaff"; 
and it is a singular fact that the scholastic festival 
should have forcibly reminded me of the great 
popular " lark." In each case it is the same race 
enjoying a certain definitely chartered license ; in 
the young votaries of a liberal education and the 
London rabble on the Epsom road it is the same 
perfect good-humour, the same muscular jocosity. 

After the presentation of the doctors came a 
series of those collegiate exercises which have a 
generic resemblance all the world over : a reading of 
Latin verses and English essays, a spouting of prize 
poems and Greek paraphrases. The prize poem 
alone was somewhat attentively listened to; the other 
things were received with an infinite variety of 



244 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xi. 

critical ejaculation. But after all, I reflected, as the 
ceremony drew to a close, this discordant racket is 
more characteristic than it seems ; it is at bottom 
only another expression of the venerable and historic 
side of Oxford. It is tolerated because it is tradi- 
tional ; it is possible because it is classical. Looking 
at it in this light, one might manage at last to find 
it impressive and romantic. 

I was not obliged to find ingenious pretexts for 
thinking well of another ceremony of which I was 
witness after we adjourned from the Sheldonian 
theatre. This was a lunch-party at the particular 
college in which I should find it the highest privilege 
to reside. I may not further specify it. Perhaps, 
indeed, I may go so far as to say that the reason for 
my dreaming of this privilege is that it is deemed by 
persons of a reforming turn the best-appointed abuse 
in a nest of abuses. A commission for the expurga- 
tion of the universities has lately been appointed by 
Parliament to look into it — a commission armed v 
with a gigantic broom, which is to sweep away all 
the fine old ivied and cobwebbed improprieties. 
Pending these righteous changes, one would like 
while one is about it — about, that is, this business 
of admiring Oxford — to attach one's self to the 
abuse, to bury one's nostrils in the rose before it is 
plucked. At the college in question there are no 
undergraduates. I found it agreeable to reflect that 
those gray-green cloisters had sent no delegates to 
the slangy congregation I had just quitted. This 
delightful spot exists for the satisfaction of a small 
society of Fellows who, having no dreary instruction 
to administer, no noisy hobbledehoys to govern, no 



XI.] TWO EXCURSIONS. 245 

obligations but toward their own culture, no care 
save for learning as learning and truth as truth, are 
presumably the happiest and most charming people 
in the world. The party invited to lunch assembled 
first in the library of the college, a cool, gray hall, 
of very great length and height, with vast wall-spaces 
of rich - looking book - titles and statues of noble 
scholars set in the midst. Had the charming Tel- 
lows ever anything more disagreeable to do than to 
finger these precious volumes and then to stroll about 
together in the grassy courts, in learned comradeship, 
discussing their precious contents ? Nothing, appar- 
ently, unless it were to give a lunch at Commemora- 
tion in the dining-hall of the college. When lunch 
was ready there was a very pretty procession to go 
to it. Learned gentlemen in crimson gowns, ladies 
in brilliant toilets, paired slowly off and marched in 
a stately diagonal across the fine, smooth lawn of the 
quadrangle, in a corner of which they passed through 
a hospitable door. But here we cross the threshold 
of privacy ; I remained on the farther side of it dur- 
ing the rest of the day. But I brought back with 
me certain memories of which, if I were not at the 
end of my space, I should attempt a discreet adum- 
bration: memories of a fete champetre in the beauti- 
ful gardens of one of the other colleges — charming 
lawns and spreading trees, music of Grenadier 
Guards, ices in striped marquees, mild flirtation of 
youthful gownsmen and bemuslined maidens ; mem- 
ories, too, of quiet dinner in common-room, a de- 
corous, excellent repast ; old portraits on the walls 
and great windows open upon the ancient court, 
where the afternoon light was fading in the stillness ; 



246 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xi. 

superior talk upon current topics, and over all the 
peculiar air of Oxford — the air of liberty to 
care for intellectual things, assured and secured 
by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to 
sense. 



XII. 

IN WAEWICKSHIRE. 

1877. 

Theee is no better way for the stranger who wishes 
to know something of England, to plunge in medias 
res, than to spend a fortnight in Warwickshire. It 
is the core and centre of the English world; mid- 
most England, unmitigated England. The place has 
taught me a great many English secrets ; I have 
interviewed the genius of pastoral Britain. From a 
charming lawn — a lawn delicious to one's sentient 
boot-sole — I looked without obstruction at a sombre, 
soft, romantic mass, whose outline was blurred by 
mantling ivy. It made a perfect picture ; and in 
the foreground the great trees overarched their 
boughs from right and left, so as to give it a 
majestic frame. This interesting object was the castle 
of Kenilworth. It was within distance of an easy 
walk, but one hardly thought of walking to it, any 
more than one would have thought of walking to a 
purple -shadowed tower in the background of a 
Berghem or a Claude. Here there were purple 
shadows, and slowly-shifting lights, and a soft-hued, 
bosky country in the middle distance. 



248 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xil. 

Of course, however, I did walk over to the 
castle ; and of course the walk led me through leafy- 
lanes, and beside the hedgerows that make a tangled 
screen for lawn-like meadows. Of course too, I am 
bound to add, there was a row of ancient pedlars 
outside the castle-wall, hawking twopenny pamphlets 
and photographs. Of course, equally, at the foot of 
the grassy mound on which the ruin stands, there 
were half a dozen public houses ; and, always of 
course, there were half a dozen beery vagrants 
sprawling on the grass in the moist sunshine. There 
was the usual respectable young woman to open the 
castle-gate and to receive the usual sixpenny fee. 
And there were the usual squares of printed card- 
board, suspended upon venerable surfaces, with 
further enumeration of twopence, threepence, four- 
pence. I do not allude to these things querulously, 
for Kenilworth is a very tame lion — a lion that, in 
former years, I had stroked more than once. I 
remember perfectly my first visit to this romantic 
spot ; how I chanced upon a picnic ; how I stumbled 
over beer-bottles ; how the very echoes of the beauti- 
ful ruin seemed to have dropped all their h's. That 
was a sultry afternoon ; I allowed my spirits to sink, 
and I came away hanging my head. This was a beau- 
tiful fresh morning, and in the interval I had grown 
philosophic. I had learned that, with regard to 
most romantic sites in England, there is a sort of 
average cockneyfication with which you must make 
your account. There are always people on the 
field before you, and there is generally something 
being drunk on the premises. 

I hoped, on the occasion of which I am now 



xn.] IN WARWICKSHIRE. 249 

speaking, that the average would be low; and in- 
deed, for the first five minutes I flattered myself 
that this was the case. In the beautiful grassy 
court of the castle, on my entrance, there were not 
more than eight or ten fellow -intruders. There 
were a couple of old ladies on a bench, eating some- 
thing out of a newspaper ; there was a dissenting 
minister, also on a bench, reading the guide-book 
aloud to his wife and sister-in-law; there were three 
or four children pushing each other up and down 
the turfy hillocks. This was sweet seclusion indeed; 
and I got a capital start with the various noble 
square- windowed fragments of the stately pile. They 
are extremely majestic, with their even, pale -red 
colour, their deep-green drapery, their princely vast- 
ness of scale. But presently the tranquil ruin 
began to swarm like a startled hive. There were 
plenty of people, if they chose to show themselves. 
They emerged from crumbling doorways and gaping 
chambers, with the best conscience in the world ; 
but I know not, after all, why I should bear them a 
grudge, for they gave me a pretext for wandering 
about in search of a quiet point of view. I cannot 
say that I found my point of view, but in looking 
for it I saw the castle, which is certainly an admir- 
able ruin. And when the respectable young woman 
had let me out of the gate again, and I had shaken 
my head at the civil-spoken pedlars who form a 
little avenue for the arriving and departing visitor, 
I found it in my good-nature to linger a moment on 
the trodden, grassy slope, and to think that in spite 
of the hawkers, the paupers, and the beer-shops, 
there was still a good deal of old England in the 



250 PORTEAITS OF PLACES. [xn. 

scene. I say in spite of these things, but it may 
have been, in some degree, because of them. "Who 
shall resolve into its component parts any impres- 
sion of this richly complex English world, where the 
present is always seen, as it were, in profile, and the 
past presents a full face ? At all events the solid 
red castle rose behind me, towering above its small 
old ladies and its investigating parsons ; before me, 
across the patch of common, was a row of ancient 
cottages, black-timbered, red-gabled, pictorial, which 
evidently had a memory of the castle in its better 
days. A quaintish village straggled away on the 
right, and on the left the dark, fat meadows were 
lighted up with misty sun-spots and browsing sheep. 
I looked about for the village stocks ; I was ready 
to take the modern -vagrants for Shakespearean 
clowns ; and I was on the point of going into one 
of the ale-houses to ask Mrs. Quickly for a cup of 
sack. 

I began these remarks, however, with no inten-' 
tion of talking about the celebrated curiosities in 
which this region abounds, but with a design, rather, 
of noting a few impressions of some of the shyer and 
more elusive ornaments of the show. Stratford, of 
course, is a very sacred place, but I prefer to say a 
word, for instance, about a charming old rectory, a 
good many miles distant, and to mention the pleasant 
picture it made of a summer afternoon, during a 
domestic festival. These are the happiest of a 
stranger's memories of English life, and he feels that 
he need make no apology for lifting the corner of 
the curtain. I drove through the leafy lanes I 
spoke of just now, and peeped over the hedges into 



Xii.] IN WARWICKSHIRE. 251 

fields where the yellow harvest stood waiting. In 
some places they were already shorn, and while the 
light began to redden in the west and to make a 
horizontal glow behind, the dense wayside foliage, 
the gleaners, here and there, came brushing through 
gaps in 'the hedges with enormous sheaves upon 
their shoulders. The rectory was an ancient, gabled 
building, of pale red brick, with facings of white 
stone and creepers that wrapped it up. It dates, I 
imagine, from the early Hanoverian time ; and as it 
stood there upon its cushiony lawn, among its 
ordered gardens, cheek to cheek with its little Nor- 
man church, it seemed to me the model of a quiet, 
spacious, easy English home. The cushiony lawn, 
as I have called it, stretched away to the edge of 
a brook, and afforded to a number of very amiable 
people an opportunity of playing lawn-tennis. There 
were half a dozen games going forward at once, and 
at each of them a great many " nice girls," as they 
say in England, were distinguishing themselves. 
These young ladies kept the ball going with an 
agility worthy of the sisters and sweethearts of a 
race of cricketers, and gave me a chance to admire 
their flexibility of figure and their freedom of action. 
When they came back to the house, after the 
games, flushed a little and a little dishevelled, they 
might have passed for the attendant nymphs of 
Diana, flocking in from the chase. There had, 
indeed, been a chance for them to wear the quiver, 
a target for archery being erected on the lawn. I 
remembered George Eliot's Gwendolen, and waited to 
see her step out of the muslin groups ; but she was 
not forthcoming, and it was plain that if lawn- 



252 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xn. 

tenms had been invented in Gwendolen's day, this 
young lady would have captivated Mr. Grandcourt 
by her exploits with the racket. She certainly 
would have been a mistress of the game ; and, if 
the suggestion is not too gross, the alertness that 
she would have learned from it might have proved 
an inducement to her boxing the ears of the in- 
supportable Deronda. 

After a while it grew too dark for lawn-tennis ; 
but while the twilight was still mildly brilliant I 
wandered away, out of the grounds of the charming 
parsonage, and turned into the little churchyard beside 
it. The small weather-worn, rust-coloured cnurch 
had an appearance of high antiquity ; there were 
some curious Norman windows in the apse. Un- 
fortunately I could not get inside ; I could only 
glance into $he open door across the interval of an 
old-timbered, heavy-hooded, padlocked porch. But 
the sweetest evening stillness hung over the place, 
and the sunset was red behind a dark row of rook-" 
haunted elms. The stillness seemed the greater 
because three or four rustic children were playing, 
with little soft cries, among the crooked, deep- 
buried grave-stones. One poor little girl, who 
seemed deformed, had climbed some steps that 
served as a pedestal for a tall, mediseval-looking 
cross. She sat perched there, staring at me through 
the gloaming. This was the heart of England, 
unmistakably ; it might have been the very pivot 
of the wheel on which her fortune revolves. One 
need not be a rabid Anglican to be extremely 
sensible of the charm of an English country church 
■ — and indeed of some of the features of an English 



XII.] IN WAKWICKSHIKE. 253 

rural Sunday. In London there is a certain flat- 
ness in the observance of tins festival ; but in the 
country some of the ceremonies that accompany it 
have an indefinable harmony with an ancient, pas- 
toral landscape. I made this reflection on an occa- 
sion that is still very fresh in my memory. I said 
to myself that the walk to church from a beautiful 
country-house, of a lovely summer afternoon, may 
be the prettiest possible adventure. The house 
stands perched upon a pedestal of rock, and looks 
down from its windows and terraces upon a shadier 
spot in the wooded meadows, of which the blunted 
tip of a spire explains the character. A little com- 
pany of people, whose costume denotes the highest 
pitch of civilisation, winds down through the bloom- 
ing gardens, passes out of a couple of small gates, 
and reaches the footpath in the fields. This is 
especially what takes the fancy of the sympathetic 
stranger; the level, deep-green meadows, studded 
here and there with a sturdy oak ; the denser 
grassiness of the footpath, the lily-sheeted pool 
beside which it passes, the rustic stiles, where he 
stops and looks back at the great house and its 
wooded background. It is in the highest degree 
probable that he has the privilege of walking with 
a very pretty girl, and it is morally certain that he 
thinks a pretty English girl the prettiest creature 
in the world. He knows that she doesn't know how 
lovely is this walk of theirs ; she has been taking 
it — or taking another quite as good — any time 
these twenty years. But her quiet-eyed unsuspect- 
ingness only makes her the more a part of his 
delicate entertainment. The latter continues un- 



254 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [xn. 

broken while they reach the little churchyard, and 
pass up to the ancient porch, round which the rosy 
rustics are standing decently and deferentially, to 
watch the arrival of the smarter contingent. This 
party takes its place in a great square pew, as large 
as a small room, and with seats all round, and 
while he listens to the respectable intonings the 
sympathetic stranger reads over the inscriptions on 
the mural tablets before him, all to the honour of 
the earlier bearers of a name which is, for himself, 
a symbol of hospitality. 

When I came back to the parsonage the enter- 
tainment had been transferred to the interior, and 
I had occasion to admire the maidenly vigour of 
those charming young girls who, after playing lawn- 
tennis all the afternoon, were modestly expecting to 
dance all the evening. And in regard to this it is 
not impertinent to say that from almost any group 
of English maidens — though preferably from such as 
have passed their lives in quiet country homes — an 
American observer receives a delightful impression 
of something that he can best describe as an inti- 
mate salubrity. He notices face after face in which 
this rosy absence of a morbid strain — this simple, 
natural, affectionate development — amounts to posi- 
tive beauty. If the young lady have no other 
beauty, the look I speak of is a sufficient charm ; 
but when it is united, as it so often is, to real 
perfection of feature and colour, the result is the 
most delightful thing in nature. It makes the 
highest type of English beauty, and to my sense 
there is nothing so high as that. Not long since 
I heard a clever foreigner indulge, in conversation 



Xir] IN WARWICKSHIRE. 255 

with an English lady — a very wise and liberal 
woman- — in a little lightly restrictive criticism of 
her countrywomen. " It is possible," she answered, 
in regard to one of his objections ; " but such as 
they are, they are inexpressibly dear to their hus- 
bands." ■ This is doubtless true of good wives all 
over the world ; but I felt, as I listened to these 
words of my friend, that there is often something 
in an English girl-face which gives it an extra 
touch of justesse. Such as the woman is, she has 
here, more than elsewhere, the look of being com- 
pletely and profoundly at the service of the man 
she loves. This look, after one has been a while 
in England, comes to seem so much a proper and 
indispensable part of a "nice" face, that the absence 
of it appears a sign of irritability or of shallowness. 
Depth of tenderness as regards a masculine counter- 
part — that is what it means ; and I confess that 
seems to me a very agreeable meaning. 

As for the prettiness, I cannot forbear, in the 
face of a fresh reminiscence, to give it another 
word. And yet in regard to prettiness, what do 
words avail? This was what I asked myself the 
other day as I looked at a young girl who stood in an 
old oaken parlour, the rugged panels of which made 
a background for her lovely head, in simple conver- 
sation with a handsome lad. I said to myself that 
the faces of English young people had often a 
singular charm, but that this same charm is too 
soft and shy a thing to talk about. The face of this 
fair creature had a pure oval, and her clear brown 
oyes a quiet warmth. Her complexion was as 
bright as a sunbeam after rain, and she smiled in a 



256 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xir. 

way that made any other way of smiling than that 
seem a shallow grimace — a mere creaking of the 
facial muscles. The young man stood facing her, 
slowly scratching his thigh and shifting from one 
foot to the other. He was tall and very well 
made, and so sun-burned that his fair hair was 
lighter than his complexion. He had honest, stupid 
blue eyes, and a simple smile that showed his 
handsome teeth. He was very well dressed. Pre- 
sently I heard what they were saying. " I suppose 
it's pretty big," said the beautiful young girl. 
" Yes ; it's pretty big," said the handsome young 
man. "It's nicer when they are big," said his 
interlocutress. The young man' looked at her, and 
at everything in general, with his slowly-appre- 
hending blue eye, and for some time no further 
remark was made. " It draws ten feet of water," he 
at last went on. " How much water is there ? " said 
the young girl. She spoke in a charming voice. 
" There are thirty feet of water," said the young man/ 
" Oh, that's enough," rejoined the damsel. I had had 
an idea they were flirting, and perhaps indeed that 
is the way it is done. It was an ancient room and 
extremely delightful ; everything was polished over 
with the brownness of centuries. The chimney-piece 
was carved a foot thick, and the windows bore, in 
coloured glass, the quarterings of ancestral couples. 
These had stopped two hundred years before ; there 
was nothing newer than that date. Outside the 
windows was a deep, broad moat, which washed the 
base of gray walls — gray walls spotted over with the 
most delicate yellow lichens. 

In such a region as this mellow, conservative War- 



xil] IN WARWICKSHIRE. 257 

wickshire an appreciative American finds the small 
things quite as suggestive as the great. Everything, 
indeed, is suggestive, and impressions are constantly 
melting into each other and doing their work before 
he has had time to ask them whence they came 
He cannot go into a cottage muffled in plants, to see 
a genial gentlewoman and a "nice girl," without 
being reminded forsooth of "The Small House at 
Arlington." Why of " The Small House at Ailing- 
ton ? " There is a larger house at which the ladies 
come up to dine ; but that is surely an insufficient 
reason. That the ladies are charming — even that 
is not reason enough ; for there have been other nice 
girls in the world than Lily Dale, and other mellow 
matrons than her mamma. Eeminded, however, he 
is — especially when he goes out upon the lawn. Of 
course there is lawn -tennis, and it seems all ready 
for Mr. Crosbie to come and play. This is a small 
example of the way in which in the presence of 
English life the imagination must be constantly at 
play, on the part of members of a race in whom it 
has necessarily been trained to do extra service. In 
driving and walking, in looking and listening, every- 
thing seemed to me in some degree or other charac- 
teristic of a rich, powerful, old-fashioned society. 
One had no need of being told that this is a con- 
servative county ; the fact seemed written in the 
hedgerows and in the verdant acres behind them. 
Of course the owners of these things were conserva- 
tive ; of course they were stubbornly unwilling to 
see the harmonious edifice of Church and State the 
least bit shaken. I had a feeling, as I went about, 
that I should find some very ancient and curious 

s 



258 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [xit 

opinions still comfortably domiciled in the fine old 
houses whose clustered gables and chimneys appeared 
here and there, at a distance, above their ornamental 
woods. Self-complacent British Toryism, viewed in 
this vague and conjectural fashion — across the fields 
and behind the oaks and beeches — is by no means 
a thing the irresponsible stranger would wish away ; 
it deepens the local colour ; it may be said to en- 
hance the landscape. I got a sort of constructive 
sense of its presence in the picturesque old towns of 
Coventry and Warwick, which appear to be filled 
with those institutions — chiefly of an eleemosynary 
order — that Toryism takes a genial comfort in. 
There are ancient charities in these places — hospitals, 
almshouses, asylums, infant-schools — so quaint and 
venerable that they almost make the existence of 
poverty a delectable and satisfying thought. In 
Coventry in especial, I believe, these pious founda- 
tions are so numerous as almost to place a premium 
upon misery. Invidious reflections apart, however* 
there are few things that speak more quaintly and 
suggestively of the old England that an American 
loves than these clumsy little monuments of ancient 
benevolence. Such an institution as Leicester's Hos- 
pital at Warwick seems indeed to exist primarily 
for the sake of its spectacular effect upon the Ameri- 
can tourists, who, with the dozen rheumatic old 
soldiers maintained in affluence there, constitute its 
principal clientele. 

The American tourist usually comes straight to 
this quarter of England — chiefly for the purpose of 
paying his respects to the birthplace of Shakespeare. 
Being here, he comes to Warwick to see the castle ; 



xii.] IN WARWICKSHIRE. 259 

and being at Warwick, he comes to see the odd little 
theatrical-looking refuge for superannuated warriors 
which lurks in the shadow of one of the old gate- 
towers. Every one will remember Hawthorne's 
account of the place, which has left no touch of 
charming taste to be added to any reference to it. 
The hospital struck me as a little museum kept up 
for the amusement and confusion of those inquiring 
Occidentals who are used to seeing charity more dryly 
and practically administered. The old hospitallers 
— I am not sure, after all, whether they are neces- 
sarily soldiers, but some of them happen to be — are 
at once the curiosities and the keepers. They sit on 
benches outside of their door, at the receipt of cus- 
tom, all neatly brushed and darned, and ready, like 
Mr. Cook, to conduct you personally. They are only 
twelve in number, but their picturesque dwelling, 
perched upon the old city rampart, and full of dusky 
little courts, cross -timbered gable -ends and deeply 
sunken lattices, seems a wonderfully elaborate piece 
of machinery for its humble purpose. Each of the 
old gentlemen must be provided with a wife or 
" housekeeper ; " each of them has a dusky parlour 
of his own ; and they pass their latter days in their 
scoured and polished little refuge as softly and 
honourably as a company of retired lawgivers or 
pensioned soothsayers. 

At Coventry I went to see a couple of old chari- 
ties of a similar pattern — places with black- timbered 
fronts, little clean -swept courts and Elizabethan 
windows. One of them was a romantic residence 
for a handful of old women, who sat, each of them, 
in a cosy little bower, in a sort of mediaeval darkness ; 



260 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xit 

the other was a school for little boys of humble 
origin, and this last establishment was charming. I 
found the little boys playing at " top " in a gravelled 
court, in front of the prettiest old building of tender- 
coloured stucco and painted timber, ornamented with 
two delicate little galleries and a fantastic porch. 
They were dressed in small blue tunics and odd caps, 
like those worn by sailors, but, if I remember rightly, 
with little yellow tags affixed to them. I was free, 
apparently, to wander all over the establishment; 
there was no sign of pastor or master anywhere ; 
nothing but the little yellow -headed boys playing 
before the ancient house, and practising most cor- 
rectly the Warwickshire accent. I went indoors 
and looked at a fine old oaken staircase ; I even 
ascended it, and walked along a gallery and peeped 
into a dormitory at a row of very short beds ; and 
then I came down and sat for five minutes on a 
bench hardly wider than the top rail of a fence, in 
a little, cold, dim refectory, where there was not a 
crumb to be seen, nor any lingering odour of bygone 
repasts to be perceived. And yet I wondered how 
it was that the sense of many generations of boyish 
feeders seemed to abide there. It came, I suppose 
from the very bareness and, if I may be allowed the 
expression, the clean-licked aspect of the place, which 
wore the appearance of the famous platter of Jack 
Sprat and his wife. 

Inevitably, of course, the sentimental tourist has 
a great deal to say to himself about this being 
Shakespeare's county — about these densely verdant 
meadows and parks having been, to his musing eyes, 
the normal landscape. In Shakespeare's day, doubt- 



XII.] IN WARWICKSHIRE. 261 

less, the coat of nature was far from being so prettily 
trimmed as it is now ; but there is one place, never- 
theless, which, as he passes it in the summer twilight, 
the traveller does his best to believe unaltered. I 
allude, of course, to Charlecote park, whose venerable 
verdure seems a survival from an earlier England, 
and whose innumerable acres, stretching away, in the 
early evening, to vaguely seen Tudor walls, lie there 
like the backward years receding to the age of Eliza- 
beth. It was, however, no part of my design in these 
remarks to pause before so thickly besieged a shrine 
as this ; and if I were to allude to Stratford, it 
would not be in connection with the fact that Shake- 
speare came into the world there. It would be rather 
to speak of a delightful old house near the Avon 
which struck me as the ideal home for a Shakespearean 
scholar, or indeed for any passionate lover of the 
poet. Here, with books, and memories, and the 
recurring reflection that he had taken his daily walk 
across the bridge, at which you look from your win- 
dows straight down an avenue of fine old trees, with 
an ever-closed gate at the end of them and a carpet 
of turf stretched over the decent drive — here, I say, 
with old brown wainscotted chambers to live in, old 
polished doorsteps to lead you from one to the other, 
deep window-seats to sit in, with a play in your lap 
— here a person for whom the cares of life should 
have resolved themselves into a care for the greatest 
genius who has represented and ornamented life, 
might find a very congruous asylum. Or, speaking 
a little wider of the mark, the charming, rambling, 
low -gabled, many-staired, much - panelled mansion 
would be a very agreeable home for any person of 



262 PORTEAITS OF PLACES. [xn. 

taste who should prefer an old house to a new. I 
find I am talking about it quite like an auctioneer ; 
but what I chiefly" had at heart was to commemorate 
the fact that I had lunched there, and while I lunched 
kept saying to myself that there is nothing in the 
world so delightful as the happy accidents of old 
English houses. 

And yet that same day, on the edge of the Avon, 
I found it in me to say that a new house too may 
be a very charming affair. But I must add that the 
new house I speak of had really such exceptional 
advantages that it could not fairly be placed in the 
scale. Besides, was it new after all ? I suppose 
that it was, and yet one's impression there was all 
of a kind of silvery antiquity. The place stood upon 
a decent Stratford street, from which it looked usual 
enough ; but when, after sitting a while in a charm- 
ing modern drawing-room, one stepped thoughtlessly 
through an open window upon a verandah, one found 
that the horizon of the morning -call had been 
wonderfully widened. I will not pretend to relate 
all that I saw after I stepped off the verandah ; suf- 
fice it that the spire and chancel of the beautiful 
old church in which Shakespeare is buried, with the 
Avon sweeping its base, were one of the elements of 
the vision. Then there were the smoothest lawns 
in the world stretching down to the edge of this 
lovely stream, and making, where the water touched 
them, a line as even as the rim of a champagne- 
glass — a verge near which you inevitably lingered 
to see the spire and the chancel — the church was 
close at hand — among the well -grouped trees, and 
look for their reflection in the river. The place was 



XII.] IN WARWICKSHIRE. 263 

a garden of delight ; it was a stage set for one of 
Shakespeare's comedies — for Twelfth Night or Much 
Ado. Just across the river was a level meadow, 
which rivalled the lawn, on which I stood, and this 
meadow seemed only the more essentially a part of 
the scene' by reason of the voluminous sheep that 
were grazing on it. These sheep were by no means 
mere edible mutton; they were poetic, historic, 
romantic sheep ; they were there to be picturesque, 
and they knew it. And yet, knowing as they were, 
I doubt whether the wisest old ram of the flock 
could have told me how to explain why it was that 
this happy mixture of lawn and river and mirrored 
spire and blooming garden seemed to me for a quarter 
of an hour the prettiest corner of England. 

If Warwickshire is Shakespeare's country, I found 
myself remembering that it is also George Eliot's. 
The author of Adam Bede and Middlemarch has 
called the rural background of those admirable fic- 
tions by another name, but I believe it long ago 
ceased to be a secret that her native Warwickshire 
had been in her intention. The stranger who wan- 
ders over its velvety surface recognises at every turn 
the elements of George Eliot's novels — especially 
when he carries himself back in imagination to the 
Warwickshire of forty years ago. He says to him- 
self that it would be impossible to conceive anything 
more conservatively bucolic, more respectably pas- 
toral. It was in one of the old nestling farmhouses., 
beyond a hundred hedgerows, that Hetty Sorrel 
smiled into her milk-pans, as if she were looking for 
a reflection of her pretty face ; it was at the end of 
one of the leafy -pillared avenues that poor Mrs. 



'264 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [XII. 

Casaubon paced up and down in fervid disappoint- 
ment. The country suggests, in especial, both the 
social and the natural scenery of Middlemarch. 
There must be many a genially perverse old Mr. 
Brooke there yet, and whether there are many 
Dorotheas or not, there must be many a well-featured 
and well -acred young country gentleman, of the 
pattern of Sir James Chettam, who, as he rides along 
the leafy lanes, softly cudgels his brain to know why 
a clever girl shouldn't wish to marry him. But I 
doubt whether there are many Dorotheas, and I 
suspect that the Sir James Chettams of the county 
are not often pushed to that intensity of meditation. 
You feel, however, that George Eliot could not have 
placed her heroine in a local medium better fitted 
to throw her fine impatience into relief — a com- 
munity more likely to be startled and perplexed by 
a questioning attitude on the part of a well-housed 
and well-fed young gentlewoman. 

Among the edifying days that I spent in these 
neighbourhoods there is one in especial of which I 
should like to give a detailed account. But I find 
on consulting my memory that the details have 
melted away into the single deep impression of a 
perfect ripeness of civilisation. It was a long 
excursion, by rail and by carriage, for the purpose 
of seeing three extremely interesting old country- 
houses. Our errand led us, in the first place, into 
Oxfordshire, through the ancient market -town of 
Banbury, where of course we made a point of looking 
out for the Cross referred to in the famous nursery- 
rhyme. It stood there in the most natural manner 
■ — though I am afraid it has been " done up " — with 



XII.] IN WARWICKSHIRE. 265 

various antique gables around it, from one of whose 
exiguous windows the young person appealed to in 
the rhyme may have looked at the old woman as she 
rode and heard the music of her bells. The houses 
we went to see have not a national reputation ; they 
are simply interwoven figures in the rich pattern of 
the Midlands. They have, indeed, a local renown, 
but they are not thought to be very exceptionally 
curious or beautiful, and the stranger has a feeling 
that his surprises and ecstasies are held to betray a 
meagre bringing-up. Such places, to a Warwickshire 
mind of good habits, must appear to be the pillars 
and props of a heaven -appointed order of things; 
and accordingly, in a land on which heaven smiles, 
they are as natural as the geology of the county or 
the supply of mutton. But nothing could well give 
a stranger a stronger impression of the wealth of 
England in such matters — of the interminable list 
of her territorial homes — than this fact^that the 
enchanting old mansions I speak of should have but 
a limited fame — should not be lions of the first 
magnitude. Of one of them, the finest in the group, 
one of my companions, who lived but twenty miles 
away, had never even heard. Such a place was not 
thought a matter to boast about. Its peers and its 
mates are scattered all over the country ; half of 
them are not even mentioned in the county guide- 
books. You stumble upon them in a drive or a 
walk. You catch a glimpse of an ivied front at 
the midmost point of a great estate, and taking your 
way, by leave of a serious old woman at a lodge-gate, 
along an overarching avenue, you find yourself intro- 
duced to an edifice so human-looking in its beauty, 



266 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xil 

that it seems for the occasion to reconcile art and 
morality. 

To Broughton Castle, the first seen in this beauti- 
ful group, I must do no more than allude ; but this 
is not because I failed to think it, as I think every 
house I see, the most delightful residence in Eng- 
land. It lies rather low, and its woods and pastures 
slope down to it ; it has a deep, clear moat all around 
it, spanned by a bridge that passes under a charming 
old gate-tower, and nothing can be prettier than to 
see its clustered walls of yellow -brown stone so 
sharply islanded, while its gardens bloom on the 
other side of the water. Like several other houses 
in this part of the country, Broughton Castle played 
a part (on the Parliamentary side) in the civil wars, 
and not the least interesting features of its beautiful 
interior are the several mementoes of Cromwell's 
station there. It was within a moderate drive of 
this place that in 1642 the battle of Edgehill was 
fought — the first great battle of the war — and 
gained by neither party. We went to see the 
battlefield, where an ancient tower and an artificial 
ruin (of all things in the world) have been erected 
for the entertainment of convivial visitors. These 
ornaments are perched upon the edge of a slope 
which commands a view of the exact scene of the 
contest, upwards of a mile away. I looked in the 
direction indicated, and saw misty meadows, a little 
greener perhaps than usual, and colonnades of elms, 
a trifle denser. After this we paid our respects to 
another old house which is full of memories and 
suggestions of that most dramatic period of English 



XII.] IN WAKWICKSIIIftE. 2G7 

history. But of Compton Wyniates (the name of 
this enchanting domicile), I despair of giving any 
coherent or adequate account. It belongs to the 
Marquis of Northampton, and it stands empty all 
the year round. It sits on the grass at the bottom 
of a wooded hollow, and the glades of a superb old 
park go wandering upward, away from it. When 
I came out in front of the house from a short and 
steep but stately avenue, I said to myself that here 
surely we had arrived at the farthest limits of what 
ivy- smothered brick- work and weather-beaten gables, 
conscious old windows and clustered mossy roofs, can 
accomplish for the eye. It is impossible to imagine 
a more perfect picture. And its air of solitude and 
delicate decay — of having been dropped into its 
grassy hollow as an ancient jewel is deposited upon 
a cushion, and being shut in from the world and 
back into the past by its circling woods — all this 
highly increased its impressiveness. The house is 
not large, as great houses go, and it sits, as I have 
said, upon the grass, without even a flagging or a 
footpath to conduct you from the point where the 
avenue stops to the beautiful sculptured doorway 
which admits you into the small, quaint, inner court. 
From this court you are at liberty to pass through 
the crookedest series of oaken halls and chambers, 
adorned with treasures of old wainscotting and 
elaborate doors and chimney-pieces. Outside, you 
may walk all round the house on a grassy bank, 
which is raised above the level on which it stands, 
and find it from every point of view a more 
charming composition. I should not omit to men- 



268 POBTEAITS OF PLACES. [xil 

tion that Compton Wyniates is supposed to have 
been in Scott's eye when he described the dwelling 
of the old royalist knight in Woodstock. In this 
case he simply transferred the house to the other 
side of the county. He has indeed given several 
of the features of the place, but he has not given 
what one may call its colour. I must add that if 
Sir "Walter could not give the colour of Compton 
Wyniates, it is useless for any other writer to 
attempt it. It is a matter for the brush and not 
for the pen. 

And what shall I say of the colour of Wroxton 
Abbey, which we visited last in order, and which in 
the thickening twilight, as we approached its great 
ivy-muffled face, made an ineffaceable impression on 
my fancy ? Wroxton Abbey, as it stands, is a 
house of about the same period as Compton Wyniates 
— the latter years, I suppose, of the sixteenth cen- 
tury. But it is quite, another affair. The place is 
inhabited, " kept up," and full of the most interesting 
and most splendid detail. Its happy occupants, 
however, were fortunately not actually staying there 
(happy occupants, in England, are almost always 
absent), and the house was exhibited with a civility 
worthy of its merit. Everything that in the material 
line can render life noble and charming has been 
gathered into it with a profusion which makes the 
whole place a monument to past opportunity. As 
I wandered from one rich room to another, looking 
at these things, that ineffaceable impression upon 
my fancy which I just mentioned was delightfully 
deepened. But who can tell the pleasures of fancy 






xii.] IN WARWICKSHIRE. 269 

when fancy takes her ease in an old English country- 
house, while the twilight darkens the corners of 
expressive rooms, and the appreciative intruder, 
pausing at the window, turns his glance from the 
observing portrait of a handsome ancestral face and 
sees the- great soft billows of the lawn melt away 
into the park ? 



XIII. 

ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 

1877. 

It is a frequent reflection with the stranger in 
England that the beauty and interest of the country 
are private property, and that to get access to them 
a key is always needed. The key may be large or it 
may be small, but it must be something that will 
turn a lock. Of the things that contribute to the 
happiness of an American observer in the country 
of parks and castles, I can think of very few that^ 
do not come under this definition of private property. 
When I have mentioned the hedgerows and the 
churches I have almost exhausted the list. You 
can enjoy a hedgerow from the public road, and I 
suppose that even if you are a Dissenter you may 
enjoy a Norman abbey from the street. If, there- 
fore, one talk of anything beautiful in England, the 
presumption will be that it is private ; and indeed 
such is my admiration of this delightful country 
that I feel inclined to say that if one talk of any- 
thing private the presumption will be that it is 
beautiful. This is something of a dilemma. If the 
observer permit himself to commemorate charming 



Xin.] ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 271 

impressions, he is in danger of giving to the world 
the fruits of friendship and hospitality. If, on the 
other hand, he withhold his impression, he lets 
something admirable slip away without having 
marked its passage, without having done it proper 
honour. • He ends by mingling discretion with 
enthusiasm, and he says to himself that it is not 
treating a country ill to talk of its treasures when 
the mention of each has tacit reference to an act of 
private courtesy. 

The impressions I have in mind in writing these 
lines were gathered in a part of England of which I 
had not before had even a traveller's glimpse ; but 
as to which, after a day or two, I found myself quite 
ready to agree with a friend who lived there, and 
who knew and loved it well, when he said very 
frankly, " I do believe it is the loveliest corner of 
the world !" This was not a dictum to quarrel 
about, and while I was in the neighbourhood I was 
quite of his opinion. I felt that it would not take 
a great deal to make me care for it very much as 
he cared for it ; I had a glimpse of the peculiar 
tenderness with which such a country may be loved. 
It is a capital example of the great characteristic of 
English scenery — of what I should call density of 
feature. There are no waste details ; everything in 
the landscape is something particular — has a history, 
has played a part, has a value to the imagination. 
It is a region of hills and blue undulations, and, 
though none of the hills are high, all of them are 
interesting — interesting as such things are interest- 
ing in an old, small country, by a kind of exquisite 
modulation, something suggesting that outline and 



272 PORTRAITS OF PLAGES. [xm. 

colouring have been retouched and refined by the 
hand of time. Independently of its castles and 
abbeys, the definite relics of the ages, such a land- 
scape seems historic. It has human relations, and 
it is intimately conscious of them. That little 
speech about the loveliness of his county, or of his 
own part of his county, was made to me by my 
companion as we walked up the grassy slope of a 
hill, or " edge," as it is called there, from the crest 
of which we seemed in an instant to look away over 
most of the remainder of England. Certainly I 
should have grown affectionate with regard to such 
a view as that. The " edge " plunged down sud- 
denly, as if the corresponding slope on the other 
side had been excavated, and one might follow the 
long ridge for the space of an afternoon's walk with 
this vast, charming prospect before one's eyes. 
Looking across an English county into the next 
but one is a very pretty entertainment, the county 
seeming by no means so small as might be supposed; 
How can a county seem small in which, from such 
a vantage-point as the one I speak of, you see, as a 
darker patch across the lighter green, the great 
estate of one of their lordships ? Beyond these are 
blue undulations of varying tone, and then another 
bosky-looking spot, which constitutes, as you are 
told, the residential umbrage of another peer. And 
to right and left of these, in wooded expanses, 
lie other domains of equal consequence. It was 
therefore not the smallness but the vastness of the 
country that struck me, and I was not at all in the 
mood of a certain American who once, in my hear- 
ing, burst out laughing at an English answer to my 



xiii.] ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 273 

inquiry as to whether my interlocutor often saw 

Mr. B . " Oh no/' the answer had been, " we 

never see him: he lives away off in the West." It 
was the western part of his county our friend meant, 
and my American humorist found matter for in- 
finite jest in his meaning. " I should as soon think 
of saying my western hand and my eastern," he 
declared. 

I do not think, even, that my disposition to form 
a sentimental attachment for this delightful region — 
for its hillside prospect of old red farmhouses light- 
ing up the dark-green bottoms, of gables and chimney- 
tops of great houses peeping above miles of woodland, 
and, in the vague places of the horizon, of far away 
towns and sites that one had always heard of — was 
conditioned upon having " property" in the neigh- 
bourhood, so that the little girls in the town should 
suddenly drop curtsies to me in the street; though 
that too would certainly have been pleasant. At 
the same time, having a little property would with- 
out doubt have made the sentiment stronger. People 
who wander about the world without money in their 
pockets indulge in dreams — dreams of the things 
they would buy if their pockets were complete. 
These dreams are very apt to have relation to a 
good estate in any neighbourhood in which the 
wanderer may happen to find himself. For myself, 
I have never been in a country so unattractive that 
it did not seem a peculiar felicity to be able to 
purchase the most considerable house it contained. 
In New England and other portions of the United 
States I have coveted the large mansion with Doric 
columns and a pediment of white-painted timber; 

T 



274 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xm. 

in Italy I have made imaginary proposals for the 
yellow- walled villa with statues on the roof. In 
England I have rarely gone so far as to fancy my- 
self in treaty for the best house, but, failing this, I 
have rarely failed to feel that ideal comfort for the 
time would be to call one's self owner of what is 
denominated here a "good" place. Is it that 
English country life seems to possess such irresistible 
charms ? I have not always thought so ; I have 
sometimes suspected that it is dull ; I have remem- 
bered that there is a whole literature devoted to 
exposing it (that of the English novel "of manners"); 
and that its recorded occupations and conversations 
occasionally strike one as lacking a certain indis- 
pensable salt. But, for all that, when, in the region 
to which I allude, my companion spoke of this and 
that place being likely sooner or later to come to the 
hammer, it seemed as if nothing could be more 
delightful than to see the hammer hanging upon 
one's own liberality. And this in spite of the fact 
that the owners of the places in question would 
part with them because they could no longer afford 
to keep them up. I found it interesting to learn, 
in so far as was possible, what sort of income was 
implied by the possession of country-seats such as 
are not in America a concomitant of even the largest 
fortunes ; and if in these revelations I sometimes 
heard of a very long rent-roll, on the other hand I 
was frequently surprised at the shortness of purse 
attributed to people living in the depths of an oak- 
studded park. Then, certainly, English country-life 
seemed to me the most advantageous thing in the 
world ; on conditions such as these one would gladly 



Xin.] ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 275 

be dull; surrounded by luxury of so moderate a 
cost one would joyfully stagnate. 

There was one place in particular of which I said 
to myself that if I had the money to buy it, I would 
" move in " on the morrow. I saw this place, un- 
fortunately, to small advantage ; I saw it in the 
rain. But I am rather glad that fine weather did 
not meddle with the affair, for I think that in this 
case the irritation of envy might have made me 
ill. It was a long, wet Sunday, and the waters 
were deep. I had been in the house all day, for 
the weather can best be described by my saying that 
it had been deemed to exonerate me from church- 
going. But in the afternoon, the prospective interval 
between lunch and tea assuming formidable propor- 
tions, my host took me out to walk, and in the 
course of our walk he led me into a park which he 
described as "the paradise of a small English country- 
gentleman." It was indeed a modern Eden, and the 
trees might have been trees of knowledge. They were 
of high antiquity and magnificent girth and stature ; 
they were strewn over the grassy levels in extraordi- 
nary profusion, and scattered upon and down the slopes 
in a fashion than which I have seen nothing more 
charming since I last looked at the chestnuts on the 
Lake of Como. It appears that the place was not 
very large, but I was unable to perceive its limits. 
Shortly before we turned into the park the rain had 
renewed itself, so that we were awkwardly wet and 
muddy ; but, being near the house, my companion 
proposed to leave his card in a neighbourly way 
The house was most agreeable ; it stood on a kind 
of terrace, in the middle of a lawn and garden, and 



276 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [xiil 

the terrace overlooked one of the most copious 
rivers in England, and across to those blue undula- 
tions of which I have already spoken. On the 
terrace also was a piece of ornamental water, and 
there was a small iron paling to divide the lawn 
from the park. All this I beheld in the rain. 
My companion gave his card to the butler, with the 
remark that we were too much bespattered to come 
in, and we turned away to complete our circuit. 
As we turned away I became acutely conscious of 
what I should have been tempted to call the cruelty 
of this proceeding. My imagination gauged the 
whole position. It was a Sunday afternoon, and it 
was raining. The house was charming, the terrace 
delightful, the oaks magnificent, the view most inter- 
esting. But the whole thing was — not to repeat the 
invidious epithet of which just now I made too gross 
a use — the whole thing was quiet. In the house 
was a drawing-room, and in the drawing-room was 
— by which I meant must be — a lady, a charming 
English lady. It seemed to me that there was 
nothing fatuous in believing that on this rainy Sun- 
day afternoon it would not please her to be told that 
two gentlemen had walked across the country to her 
door only to go through the ceremony of leaving a 
card. Therefore, when, before we had gone many 
yards, I heard the butler hurrying after us, I felt 
how just my sentiment of the situation had been. 
Of course we went back, and I carried my muddy 
boots into the drawing-room — just the drawing-room 
I had imagined — where I found — I will not say just 
the lady I had imagined, but a lady even more 
charming. Indeed, there were two ladies, one of 



xiii.] ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 277 

whom was staying in the house. In whatever com 
pany you find yourself in England, you may always 
be sure that some one present is " staying." I 
seldom hear this participle nowadays without re- 
membering an observation made to me in France 
by a lady who had seen much of English manners. 
" Ah, that dreadful word staying ! I think we are 
so happy in France not to be able to translate it — 
not to have any word that answers to it." The large 
windows of the drawing-room I speak of looked 
away over the river to the blurred and blotted hills, 
where the rain was drizzling and drifting. It was 
very quiet, as I say ; there was an air of large 
leisure. If one wanted to do something here, there 
was evidently plenty of time — and indeed of every 
other appliance — to do it. The two ladies talked 
about "town:" that is what people talk about in 
the country. If I were disposed I might represent 
them as talking about it with a certain air of yearn- 
ing. At all events, I asked myself how it was 
possible that one should live in this charming place 
and trouble one's head about what was going on in 
London in July. Then we had excellent tea. 

I returned to the habitation of my companion — 
for I too was guilty of " staying " — through an old 
Norman portal, massively arched and quaintly 
sculptured, across whose hollow threshold the eye of 
fancy might see the ghosts of monks and the shadows 
of abbots pass noiselessly to and fro. This aperture 
admits you to a beautiful ambulatory of the thir- 
teenth century — a long stone gallery or cloister, 
repeated in two stories, with the interstices of 
its traceries now glazed, but with its long, low. 



278 POKTKAITS OF PLACES. [xnx. 

narrow, charming vista still perfect and picturesque 
— with its flags worn away by monkish sandals, and 
with huge round-arched doorways opening from its 
inner side into great rooms roofed like cathedrals. 
These rooms are furnished with narrow windows, of 
almost defensive aspect, set in embrasures three feet 
deep, and ornamented with little grotesque mediaeval 
faces. To see one of the small monkish masks 
grinning at you while you dress and undress, or 
while you look up in the intervals of inspiration 
from your letter writing, is a mere detail in the 
entertainment of living in a ci-devant priory. This 
entertainment is inexhaustible ; for every step you 
take in such a house confronts you in one way or 
another with the remote past. You feast upon the 
pictorial, you inhale the historic. Adjoining the 
house is a beautiful ruin, part of the walls and 
windows and bases of the piers of the magnificent 
church administered by the predecessor of your host, 
the abbot. These relics are very desultory, but they 
are still abundant, and they testify to the great 
scale and the stately beauty of the abbey. You may 
lie upon the grass at the base of an ivied fragment, 
measure the girth of the great stumps of the central 
columns, half smothered in soft creepers, and think 
how strange it is that in this quiet hollow, in the 
midst of lonely hills, so exquisite and elaborate a 
work of art should have arisen. It is but an hour's 
walk to another great ruin, which has held together 
more completely. There the central tower stands 
erect to half its altitude, and the round arches and 
massive pillars of the nave make a perfect vista on 
the unencumbered turf. You get an impression 



xiil] ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 279 

that when catholic England was in her prime, great 
abbeys were as thick as milestones. By native 
amatenrs, even now, the region is called " wild," 
though to American eyes it seems almost suburban 
in its smoothness and finish. There is a noiseless 
little railway running through the valley, and there 
is an ancient little town at the abbey-gates — a town, 
indeed, with no great din of vehicles, but with goodly 
brick houses, with a dozen " publics," with tidy, 
whitewashed cottages, and with little girls, as I have 
said, bobbing curtsies in the street. But even now, 
if one had wound one's way into the valley by the 
.railroad, it would be rather a surprise to find a 
small ornamental cathedral in a spot on the whole so 
natural and pastoral. How impressive then must 
the beautiful church have been in the days of its 
prosperity, when the pilgrim came down to it from 
the grassy hillside and its bells made the stillness 
sensible ! The abbey was in those days a great 
affair ; as my companion said, it sprawled all over 
the place. As you walk away from it you think 
you have got to the end of its geography, but you 
encounter it still in the shape of a rugged out- 
house enriched with an early -English arch, or an 
ancient well, hidden in a kind of sculptured cavern. 
It is noticeable that even if you are a traveller from 
a land where there are no early-English — and indeed 
few late-English — arches, and where the well-covers 
are, at their hoariest, of fresh-looking shingles, you 
grow used with little delay to all this antiquity. 
Anything very old seems extremely natural ; there 
is nothing we accept so implicitly as transmitted 
associations. It is not too much to say that after 



280 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xm. 

spending twenty-four hours in a house that is six 
hundred years old, you seem yourself to have lived 
in it for six hundred years. You seem yourself to 
have hollowed the flags with your tread, and to have 
polished the oak with your touch. You walk along 
the little stone gallery where the monks used to 
pace, looking out of the gothic window -places at 
their beautiful church, and you pause at the big 
round, rugged doorway that admits you to what is 
now the drawing-room. The massive step by which 
you ascend to the threshold is a trifle crooked, as it 
should be ; the lintels are cracked and worn by 
the myriad-fingered years. This strikes your casual 
glance. You look up and down the miniature 
cloister before you pass in ; it seems wonderfully 
old and queer. Then you turn into the drawing- 
room, where you find modern conversation and late 
publications and the prospect of dinner. The new 
life and the old have melted together ; there is no 
dividing-line. In the drawing-room wall is a queer 
funnel-shaped hole, with the broad end inward, like 
a small casemate. You ask what it is, but people 
have forgotten. It is something of the monks ; 
it is a mere detail. After dinner you are told that 
there is of course a ghost — a gray friar who is seen 
in the dusky hours at the end of passages. Some- 
times the servants see him ; they afterwards go sur- 
reptitiously to sleep in the village. Then, when you 
take your chamber-candle and go wandering bedward 
by a short cut through empty rooms, you are con- 
scious of a peculiar sentiment toward the gray friar 
which you hardly know whether to interpret as a 
hope or a reluctance. 



xin.] ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 281 

A friend of mine, an American, who knew this 
country, had told me not to fail, while I was in 

the neighbourhood, to go to S and two or 

three other places. " Edward IV. and Elizabeth," he 
said, " are still hanging about there." So admon« 

ished, I made a point of going at least to S , 

and I saw quite what my friend meant. Edward IV. 
and Elizabeth, indeed, are still to be met almost any- 
where in the county ; as regards domestic architec- 
ture, few parts of England are still more vividly old- 
English. I have rarely had, for a couple of hours, 
the sensation of dropping back personally into the 
past in a higher degree than while I lay on the grass 
beside the well in the little sunny court of this small 
castle, and lazily appreciated the still definite details 
of mediaeval life. The place is a capital example of 
what the French call a small gentilhommidre of the 
thirteenth century. It has a good deep moat, now 
filled with wild verdure, and a curious gatehouse of 
a much later period — the period when the defensive 
attitude had been wellnigh abandoned. This gate- 
house, which is not in the least in the style of the 
habitation, but gabled and heavily timbered, with 
quaint cross-beams protruding from surfaces of coarse 
white plaster, is a very effective anomaly in regard 
to the little gray fortress on the other side of the 
court. I call this a fortress, but it is a fortress 
which might easily have been taken, and it must 
have assumed its present shape at a time when 
people had ceased to peer through narrow slits at 
possible besiegers. There are slits in the outer walls 
for such peering, but they are noticeably broad and 
not particularly oblique, and might easily have been 



282 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xm. 

applied to the uses of a peaceful parley. This is 
part of the charm of the place; human life there 
must have lost an earlier grimness ; it was lived in 
by people who were beginning to believe in good 
intentions. They must have lived very much to- 
gether ; that is one of the most obvious reflections 
in the court of a mediaeval dwelling. The court was 
not always grassy and empty, as it is now, with only 
a couple of gentlemen in search of impressions lying 
at their length, one of whom has taken a wine-flask 
out of his pocket and has coloured the clear water 
drawn for them out of the well in a couple of tum- 
blers by a decent, rosy, smiling, talking old woman, 
who has come bustling out of the gatehouse, and 
who has a large, dropsical, innocent husband standing 
about on crutches in the sun, and making no sign 
when you ask after his health. This poor man has 
reached that ultimate depth of human simplicity at 
which even a chance to talk about one's ailments is 
not appreciated. But the civil old woman talks for 
every one, even for an artist who has come out of 
one of the rooms, where I see him afterward repro- 
ducing its mouldering repose. The rooms are all 
unoccupied and in a state of extreme decay, though 
the castle is, as yet, far from being a ruin. From 
one of the windows I see a young lady sitting under 
a tree, across a meadow, with her knees up, dipping 
something into her mouth. It is a camel's hair 
paint-brush ; the young lady is sketching. These 
are the only besiegers to which the place is exposed 
now, and they can do no great harm, as I doubt 
whether the young lady's aim is very good. We 
wandered about the empty interior, thinking it a 



xiii.] ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 283 

pity such tilings should fall to pieces. There is a 
beautiful great hall — great, that is, for a small castle 
(it would be extremely handsome in a modern house) 
— with tall, ecclesiastical -looking windows, and a 
long staircase at one end, climbing against the wall 
into a spacious bedroom. You may still apprehend 
very well the main lines of that simpler life ; and it 
must be said that, simpler though it was, it was 
apparently by no means destitute of many of our 
own conveniences. The chamber at the top of the 
staircase ascending from the hall is charming still, 
with its irregular shape, its low-browed ceiling, its 
cupboards in the walls, and its deep bay window 
formed of a series of small lattices. You can fancy 
people stepping out from it upon the platform of the 
staircase, whose rugged wooden logs, by way of steps, 
and solid, deeply -guttered hand-rail, still remain. 
They looked down into the hall, where, I take it, 
there was always a congregation of retainers, much 
lounging and waiting and passing to and fro, with a 
door open into the court. The court, as I said just 
now, was not the grassy, aesthetic spot which you 
may find it at present of a summer's day ; there were 
beasts tethered in it, and hustling men-at-arms, and 
the earth was trampled into puddles. But my lord 
or my lady, looking down from the chamber-door, 
commanded the position and, no doubt, issued their 
orders accordingly. The sight of the groups on the 
floor beneath, the calling up and down, the oaken 
tables spread, and the brazier in the middle — all 
this seemed present again ; and it was not difficult 
to pursue the historic vision through the rest of the 
building — through the portion which connected the 



284 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xin. 

great hall with the tower (here the confederate of the 
sketching young lady without had set up the peaceful 
three-legged engine of his craft); through the dusky, 
roughly circular rooms of the tower itself, and up 
the corkscrew staircase of the same to that most 
charming part of every old castle, where visions must 
leap away off the battlements to elude you — the 
bright, dizzy platform at the tower -top, the place 
where the castle -standard hung and the vigilant 
inmates surveyed the approaches. Here, always, 
you really overtake the impression of the place — 
here, in the sunny stillness, it seems to pause, pant- 
ing a little, and give itself up. 

It was not only at Stokesay — I have written the 
name at last, and I will not efface it — that I lingered 
a while on the summit of the keep to enjoy the com- 
plete impression so overtaken. I spent such another 
half hour at Ludlow, which is a much grander and 
more famous monument. Ludlow, however, is a 
ruin — the most impressive and magnificent of ruins. 
The charming old town and the admirable castle 
form a capital object of pilgrimage. Ludlow is an 
excellent example of a small English provincial town 
that has not been soiled and disfigured by industry ; 
it exhibits no tall chimneys and smoke -streamers, 
with their attendant purlieus and slums. The little 
city is perched upon a hill near which the goodly 
Severn wanders, and it has a remarkable air of civic 
dignity. Its streets are wide and clean, empty and 
a little grass -grown, and bordered with spacious, 
mildly -ornamental brick houses, which look as if 
there had been more going on in them in the first 
decade of the century than there is in the present, 



xiii.] ABBEYS AND CASTLES. 285 

but which can still, nevertheless, hold up their heads 
and keep their window-panes clear, their knockers 
brilliant and their door steps whitened. The place 
seems to say that a hundred years, and less, ago it 
was the centre of a large provincial society, and that 
this society was very " good " of its kind. It must 
have transported itself to Ludlow for the season — 
in rumbling coaches and heavy curricles — and there 
entertained itself in decent emulation of that metro- 
polis which a choice of railway lines had not as yet 
placed within its immediate reach. It had balls 
at the assembly rooms ; it had Mrs. Siddons to 
play ; it had Catalani to sing. Miss Burney's and 
Miss Austen's heroines might perfectly well have 
had their first love-affair there ; a journey to Ludlow 
would certainly have been a great event to Fanny 
Price or Emma Woodhouse, or even to those more 
exalted young ladies, Evelina and Cecilia. It is a 
place on which a provincial " gentry " has left a 
sensible stamp. I have seldom seen so good a 
collection of houses of the period between the elder 
picturesqueness and the modern baldness. Such 
places, such houses, such relics and intimations, 
always carry me back to the near antiquity of that 
pre- Victorian England which it is still easy for a 
stranger to picture with a certain vividness, thanks 
to the partial survival of many of its characteristics. 
It is still easier for a stranger who has stayed a 
while in England to form an idea of the tone, the 
habits, the aspect of English social life before its 
classic insularity had begun to wane, as all observers 
agree that it did, about thirty years ago. It is true 
that the mental operation in this matter reduces 



286 PORTKAITS OF PLACES. [xm. 

itself to fancying some of the things which form 
what Mr. Matthew Arnold would call the peculiar 
"notes" of England infinitely exaggerated — the rigidly 
aristocratic constitution of society, for instance ; the 
unsesthetic temper of the people ; the private char- 
acter of most kinds of comfort and entertainment. 
Let an old gentleman of conservative tastes, who 
can remember the century's youth, talk to you at a 
club temporis adi — tell you wherein it is that from 
his own point of view London, as a residence for a 
gentleman, has done nothing but fall off for the last 
forty years. You will listen, of course, with an air 
of decent sympathy, but privately you will say to 
yourself how difficult a place of sojourn London 
must have been in those days for a stranger — how 
little cosmopolitan, how bound in a thousand ways, 
with narrowness of custom. What is true of the 
metropolis at that time is of course doubly true of 
the provinces ; and a genteel little city like the one 
I am speaking of must have been a kind of focus 
of insular propriety. Even then, however, the 
irritated alien would have had the magnificent ruins 
of the castle to dream himself back into good 
humour in. They would effectually have trans- 
ported him beyond all waning or waxing Phil- 
istinisms. 



XTY. 

ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 

1879. 



Toward the last of April, in Monmouthshire, the 
primroses were as big as jour fist. I say " in Mon- 
mouthshire," because I believe that a certain grassy 
mountain which I gave myself the pleasure of 
climbing, and to which I took my way across the 
charming country, through lanes where the hedges 
were perched upon blooming banks, lay within the 
borders of this ancient province. It was the festive 
Eastertide, and a pretext for leaving London had 
not been wanting. Of course it rained, — it rained 
a good deal, — for man and the weather are usually 
at cross-purposes. But there were intervals of light 
and warmth, and in England a couple of hours of 
fine weather, islanded in moisture, assert their in- 
dependence and leave an uncompromised memory. 
These bright episodes were eveD of longer duration; 
that whole morning, for instance, on which, with a 
companion, I scrambled up the little Skirrid. One 
had a feeling that one was very far from London ; 



288 POETKAITS OF PLACES. [xiv. 

as, in fact, one was, after six or seven hours in a 
smooth, swift English train. In England this is a 
great remoteness ; it seemed to justify the half-re- 
luctant confession which I heard constantly made, 
that the country was extremely " wild." There is 
wildness and wildness, I thought ; and though I had 
not been a great explorer, I compared this rough 
district with several neighbourhoods in another part 
of the world that passed for tame. I went even 
so far as to wish that some of its ruder features 
might be transplanted to that relatively unregulated 
landscape and commingled with its suburban sava- 
gery. I went over the elements of this English pro- 
spect and of human life in the midst of it, and 
wondered whether, if I were to enumerate thsm 
and leave them to be added up by the dwellers 
beyond the sea, the total would be set down as a 
wilderness. We were close to the Welsh border, 
and a dozen little mountains in the distance were 
peeping over each other's shoulders. But nature 
was open to the charge of no worse disorder than this. 
The Skirrid (I like to repeat the name) wore, it is 
true, at a distance, the aspect of a magnified ex- 
tinguisher ; but when, after a bright, breezy walk 
through lane and meadow, we had scrambled over 
the last of the thickly -flowering hedges which lay 
around its shoulders like loosened strings of coral 
and began to ascend the grassy cone (very much in 
the attitude of Nebuchadnezzar), it proved as 
smooth-faced as a garden-mound. Hard by, on the 
flanks of other hills, were troops of browsing sheep, 
and the only thing in which there was any harshness 
of suggestion was the strong, damp wind. But even 



XIV.] ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 289 

this had a good deal of softness in it, and ministered 
to my sense of the agreeable in scenery by the way 
it blew abont the pearly morning mists that were 
airing themselves upon neighbouring ridges, and 
kept shaking the vaporous veil that fluttered down 
in the Valley over the picturesque little town of 
Abergavenny. A breezy, grassy English hill-top, 
looking down on a country full of suggestive names 
and ancient memories, belongs (especially if you are 
exhilarated by a beautiful walk, and you have a 
flask in your pocket) decidedly to the category of 
smooth scenery. And so with all the rest of it. 

On Sunday I stayed away from church, because 
I learned that the sacred edifice had a mediseval 
chill, and that if I should sit there for a couple of 
hours I might inherit a lumbago three hundred years 
old. The fact was formidable, but the idea was, 
in a certain way, attractive; there was nothing 
crude in a rheumatism which descended from the 
Norman times. Practical considerations, however, 
determined me not to expose myself to this vener- 
able pain ; so in the still hours, when the roads and 
lanes were empty, I simply walked to the church- 
yard and sat upon one of the sun -warmed grave- 
stones. I say the roads were empty, but they were 
peopled with the big primroses I just now spoke of 
— primroses of the size of ripe apples, and yet, in 
spite of their rank growth, of as pale and tender a 
yellow as if their gold had been diluted with silver. 
It was indeed a mixture of gold and silver, for there 
was a wealth of the white wood-anemone as well, 
and these delicate flowers, each of so perfect a coin- 
age, were tumbled along the green wayside as if a 

u 



290 POKTKAITS OF PLACES. [xiv. 

prince had been scattering largesse. The outside of 
an old English country-church in service-time is a 
very pleasant place ; and this is as near as I often 
care to approach to the celebration of the Anglican 
mysteries. A just sufficient sense of their august 
character may be gathered from that vague sound of 
village-music which makes its way out into the still- 
ness, and from the perusal of those portions of the 
Prayer-Book which are inscribed upon mouldering 
slabs and dislocated headstones. The church I speak 
of was a beautiful specimen of its kind — intensely 
aged, variously patched, but still solid and useful, and 
with no touch of restoration. It was very big and 
massive, and, hidden away in the fields, it had a 
kind of lonely grandeur ; there was nothing in par- 
ticular near it but its out-of-the-world little parson- 
age. It was only one of ten thousand ; I had seen 
a hundred such before. But I watched the watery 
sunshine upon the rugosities of its ancient masonry; 
I stood a while in the shade of two or three spread- * 
ing yews which stretched their black arms over 
graves decorated for Easter, according to the custom 
of that country, with garlands of primrose and dog- 
violet ; and I reflected that in a wild region it was 
a blessing to have so quiet a place of refuge as 
that. 

Later, I chanced upon a couple of other asylums 
which were more spacious and no less tranquil. 
Both of them were old country-houses, and each in 
its way was charming. One was a half-modernised 
feudal dwelling, lying in a wooded hollow — a large 
concavity filled with a delightful old park. The 
house had a long gray facade and half a dozen 



XIV.] ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 291 

towers, and the usual supply of ivy and of clustered 
chimneys relieved against a background of rook- 
haunted elms. But the windows were all closed 
and the avenue was untrodden ; the house was the 
property of a lady who could not afford to live in it 
in becoming state, and who had let it, furnished, to 
a rich young man "for the shooting." The rich 
young man occupied it but for three weeks in the 
year, and for the rest of the time left it a prey to the 
hungry gaze of the passing stranger, the would-be 
redresser of aesthetic wrongs. It seemed a great 
aesthetic wrong that so charming a place should not 
be a conscious, sentient home. But in England all 
this is very common. It takes a great many plain 
people to keep a gentleman going; it takes a great 
deal of wasted sweetness to make up a property. It 
is true that, in the other case I speak of, the sweet- 
ness, which here was even greater, was less sensibly 
squandered. If there was no one else in the house, 
at least there were ghosts. It had a dark red front 
and grim-looking gables ; it was perched upon a sort 
of terrace, quite high in the air, which was reached 
by steep, crooked, mossy steps. Beneath these steps 
was an ancient bit of garden, and from the hither 
side of the garden stretched a great expanse of turf. 
Out of the midst of the turf sprang a magnificent 
avenue of Scotch firs — a perfect imitation of the 
Italian stone-pine. It looked like the Villa Bor- 
ghese transplanted to the Welsh hills. The huge, 
smooth stems, in their double row, were crowned 
with dark parasols. In the Scotch fir or the Italian 
pine there is always an element of grotesqueness ; 
the open umbrella in a rainy country is not a poetical 



292 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xrvr. 

analogy, and the case is not better if you compare 
the tree to a colossal mushroom. But, without 
analogies, there was something very striking in the 
effect of this enormous, rigid vista, and in the grassy 
carpet of the avenue, with the dusky,, lonely, high- 
featured house looking down upon it. There was 
something solemn and tragical; the place was made 
to the hand of a romancer, and he might have found 
his characters within ; the leaden lattices were open. 



II. 

The Isle of Wight is disappointing at first. I 
wondered why it should be, and then I found the 
reason in the influence of the detestable little rail- 
way. There can be no doubt that a railway in the 
Isle of Wight is a gross impertinence ; it is in evident 
contravention to the natural style of the place. The 
place is minutely, delicately picturesque, or it is 
nothing at all. It is purely ornamental ; it exists' 
for the entertainment of tourists. It is separated by 
nature from the dense railway -system of the less 
diminutive island, and it is the corner of the world 
where a good carriage - road is most in keeping. 
Never was there a better place for sacrificing to 
prettiness ; never was there a better chance for not 
making a railway. But now there are twenty trains 
a day, and the prettiness is twenty times less. The 
island is so small that the hideous embankments 
and tunnels are obtrusive ; the sight of them is as 
painful as it would be to see a pedlar's pack on 
the shoulders of a pretty woman. This is your first 
impression as you travel (naturally by the objec- 



xiv.] ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 293 

tionable conveyance) from Eycle to Ventnor ; and 
the fact that the train rumbles along very smoothly, 
and stops at half a dozen little stations, where the 
groups on the platform enable you to perceive that 
the population consists almost exclusively of gentle- 
men in costumes suggestive of unlimited leisure for 
attention to cravats and trousers (an immensely large 
class in England), of old ladies of the species de- 
nominated in France rentidres, of young ladies of the 
highly-educated and sketching variety, this circum- 
stance fails to reconcile you to the chartered cicatrix 
which forms your course. At Ventnor, however, 
face to face with the sea, and with the blooming 
shoulder of the Undercliff close behind you, you lose 
sight to a certain extent of the superfluities of civil- 
isation. Not, indeed, that Ventnor has not been 
diligently civilised. It is a well-regulated little 
watering-place, and it has been subjected to a due 
measure of cockneyfication. But the glittering 
ocean remains, shimmering at moments with blue 
and silver, and the large gorse-covered downs rise 
superbly above it. Ventnor hangs upon the side of 
a steep hill, and here and there it clings and scram- 
bles, it is propped and terraced, like one of the 
bright - faced little towns that look down upon the 
Mediterranean. To add to the Italian effect, the 
houses are all denominated villas, though it must be 
added that nothing is less like an Italian villa than 
an English one. Those which ornament the succes- 
sive ledges at Ventnor are for the most part small 
semi-detached boxes, predestined, even before they 
had fairly come into the world, to the entertainment 
of lodgers. They stand in serried rows all over the 



294 PORTKAITS OF PLACES. [xiv. 

place, with the finest names in the British Peerage 
painted upon their gate-posts. Their severe simi- 
larity of aspect, however, is such that even the 
difference between Plantagenet and Percival, between 
Montgomery and Montmorency, is hardly sufficient 
to enlighten the puzzled visitor. An English water- 
ing-place is much more comfortable than an Ameri- 
can ; in a Plantagenet villa the art of receiving 
"summer guests" has usually been brought to a 
higher perfection than in an American rural hotel. 
But what strikes an American, with regard to even 
so charmingly -nestled a little town as Yentnor, is 
that it is far less natural, less pastoral and bosky, 
than his own fond image of a summer- retreat. 
There is too much brick and mortar ; there 
are too many smoking chimneys and shops 
and public - houses ; there are no woods nor 
brooks, nor lonely headlands ; there is none of 
the virginal stillness of Nature. Instead of these 
things, there is an esplanade, mostly paved with 
asphalt, bordered with benches and little shops, and 
provided with a German band. To be just to Vent- 
nor, however, I must hasten to add that once you 
get away from the asphalt there is a great deal of 
vegetation. The little village of Bonchurch, which 
closely adjoins it, is buried in the most elaborate 
verdure, muffled in the smoothest lawns and the 
densest shrubbery. Bonchurch is simply delicious, 
and indeed in a manner quite absurd. It is like a 
model village in imitative substances, kept in a big 
glass case ; the turf might be of green velvet and 
the foliage of cut paper. The villagers are all happy 
gentlefolk, the cottages have plate -glass windows, 



XIV.] ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 295 

and the rose-trees on their walls are tended by an 
under-gardener. Passing from Ventnor through the 
elegant umbrage of Bonchurch, and keeping along 
the coast toward Shanklin, you come to the prettiest 
part of the Undercliff, or, in other words, to the 
prettiest place in the world. The immense grassy 
cliffs which form the coast of the island make what 
the French would call a " false descent" to the sea. 
At a certain point the descent is broken, and a wide 
natural terrace, all overtangled with wild shrubs and 
flowers, hangs there in mid-air, half-way above the 
ocean. It is impossible to imagine anything more 
charming than this long, blooming platform, pro- 
tected from the north by huge green bluffs and 
plunging on the other side into the murmuring tides. 
This delightful arrangement constitutes for a distance 
of some fifteen miles the south shore of the Isle of 
"Wight ; but the best of it, as I have said, is to be 
found in the four or five miles that separate Ventnor 
from Shanklin. Of a lovely afternoon in April these 
four or five miles are an enchanting walk. 

Of course you must first catch your lovely after- 
noon. I caught one ; in fact, I caught two. On 
the second I climbed up the downs, and perceived 
that it was possible to put their gorse- covered 
stretches to still other than pedestrian uses — to de- 
vote them to sedentary pleasures. A long lounge 
in the lee of a stone wall, the lingering, fading after- 
noon light, the reddening sky, the band of blue 
sea above the level-topped bunches of gorse — these 
things, enjoyed as an undertone to the conversation 
of an amiable compatriot, seemed indeed a very 
sufficient substitute for that primitive stillness of 



296 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xiV. 

the absence of which I ventured just now to com- 
plain. 

III. 

It was probably a mistake to stop at Portsmouth. 
I had done so, however, in obedience to a familiar 
theory that seaport-towns abound in local colour, in 
curious types, in the quaint and the strange. But 
these charms, it must be confessed, were signally 
wanting to Portsmouth, along whose sordid streets I 
strolled for an hour, vainly glancing about me for 
an overhanging facade or a group of Maltese sailors. 
I was distressed to perceive that a famous seaport 
could be at once untidy and prosaic. Portsmouth 
is dirty, but it is also dull. It may be roughly 
divided into the dock-yard and the public-houses. 
The dock-yard, into which I was unable to pene- 
trate, is a colossal enclosure, signalised externally by 
a grim brick wall, as featureless as an empty black- 
board. The dockyard eats up the town, as it were, and 
there is nothing left over but the gin-shops, which 
the town drinks up. There is not even a crooked 
old quay of any consequence, with brightly patched 
houses looking out upon a forest of masts. To begin 
with, there are no masts ; and then there are no poly- 
glot sign-boards, no overhanging upper stories, no out- 
landish parrots and macaws perched in open lattices. 
I had another hour or so before my train departed, 
and it would have gone hard with me if I had not 
bethought myself of hiring a boat and being pulled 
about in the harbour. Here a certain amount of 
entertainment was to be found. There were great 
iron-clads, and white troopships that looked vague 



xiv.] ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 297 

and spectral, like the floating home of the Flying 
Dutchman, and small, devilish vessels whose mission 
was to project the infernal torpedo. I coasted about 
these metallic islets ; and then, to eke out my en- 
tertainment, I boarded the Victory. The Victory is 
an ancient frigate of enormous size, which in the 
days of her glory carried I know not how many 
hundred guns, but whose only function now is to 
stand year after year in Portsmouth waters and ex- 
hibit herself to the festive cockney. Bank-holiday 
is now her great date ; once upon a time it was 
Trafalgar. The Victory, in short, was Nelson's ship ; 
it was on her huge deck that he was struck and in 
her deep bowels he breathed his last. The vener- 
able vessel is provided with a company of ushers, 
like the Tower of London or Westminster Abbey, 
and it is hardly less solid and spacious than either 
of those edifices. A good man in uniform did me 
the honours of the ship with a terrible displacement 
of 7i's, and there seemed something strange in the 
way it had lapsed from its heroic part. It had car- 
ried two hundred guns and a mighty warrior, and 
boomed against the enemies of England ; it had been 
the scene of one of the most thrilling and touching 
events in English history. Now, it was hardly more 
than a mere source of income to the Portsmouth 
watermen — an objective point for Whitsuntide ex- 
cursionists — a thing that a foreign observer must 
allude to very casually, for fear of seeming vulgar, 
or even serious. 



298 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xiv. 



But I recouped myself, as they say in England, 
by stopping afterwards at Chichester. In this dense 
and various old England two places may be very 
near together and yet strike a very different note. 
I knew in a general way that there was a cathedral 
at Chichester ; indeed, I had seen its beautiful spire 
from the window of the train. I had always regarded 
an afternoon in a little cathedral-town as a high 
order of entertainment, and a morning at Portsmouth 
had left me in the mood for not missing such an 
exhibition. The spire of Chichester at a little dis- 
tance greatly resembles that of Salisbury. It is on 
a smaller scale, but it tapers upward with a delicate 
slimness which, like that of its famous rival, makes 
a picture of the level landscape in which it stands. 
Unlike the spire of Salisbury, however, it has not 
at present the charm of antiquity. A few years ago 
the old steeple collapsed and tumbled into the church, 
and the present structure is but a modern facsimile. 
The cathedral is not of the highest interest ; it is 
rather plain and bare, and, except a curious old 
detached bell -tower which stands beside it, has no 
particular element of unexpectedness. But an Eng- 
lish cathedral of restricted grandeur may yet be a 
very charming affair ; and I spent an hour or so 
lounging around this highly respectable edifice, with- 
out the spell of contemplation being broken by satiety. 
I approached it, from the station, by the usual quiet 
red-brick street of the usual cathedral town — a street 
of small, excellent shops, before which, here and there, 



Xiv.] ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 299 

one of the vehicles of the neighbouring gentry was 
drawn up beside the curbstone, while the grocer or 
the bookseller, who had hurried out obsequiously, 
was waiting upon the comfortable occupant. I went 
into a bookseller's to buy a Chichester guide, which 
I perceived in the window ; I found the shopkeeper 
talking to a young curate in a soft hat. The guide 
seemed very desirable, though it appeared to have 
been but scantily desired ; it had been published in 
the year 1841, and a very large remnant of the 
edition, with a muslin back and a little white label 
and paper- covered boards, was piled up on the counter. 
It was dedicated, with terrible humility, to the Duke 
of Eichmond, and ornamented with primitive wood- 
cuts and steel plates ; the ink had turned brown and 
the page musty; and the style itself — that of a 
provincial antiquary of upwards of forty years ago 
penetrated with the grandeur of the aristocracy — 
had grown rather sallow and stale. Nothing could 
have been more mellifluous and urbane than the 
young curate : he was arranging to have the Times 
newspaper sent him every morning for perusal. " So 
it will be a penny if it is fetched away at noon ? " 
he said, smiling very sweetly and with the most 
gentlemanly voice possible ; " and it will be three 
halfpence if it is fetched away at four o'clock ? " At 
the top of the street, into which, with my guide-book, 
I relapsed, was an old market-cross, of the fifteenth 
century — a florid, romantic little structure. It con- 
sists of a stone pavilion, with open sides and a number 
of pinnacles and crockets and buttresses, besides a 
goodly medallion of the high-nosed visage of Charles 
\, which was placed above one of the arches, at the 



300 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xiv. 

Kestoration, in compensation for the violent havoc 
wrought upon the little town by the Parliamentary 
soldiers, who had wrested the place from the Boyalists, 
and who amused themselves, in their grim fashion, 
with infinite hacking and hewing in the cathedral. 
Here, to the left, the cathedral discloses itself, lifting 
its smart gray steeple out of a pleasant garden. Op- 
posite to the garden was the Dolphin or the Dragon 
— in fine, the most eligible inn. I must confess that 
for a time it divided my attention with the cathedral, 
in virtue of an ancient, musty parlour on the second 
floor, with hunting -pictures hung above haircloth 
sofas ; of a red-faced waiter, in evening dress ; of a 
big round of cold beef and a tankard of ale. The 
prettiest thing at Chichester is a charming little 
three-sided cloister, attached to the cathedral, where, 
as is usual in such places, you may sit upon a grave- 
stone amid the deep grass in the middle, and measure 
the great central mass of the church — the large gray 
sides, the high foundations of the spire, the parting 
of the nave and transept. From this point the great- 
ness of a cathedral seems more complex and impres- 
sive. You watch the big shadows slowly change 
their relations ; you listen to the cawing of rooks 
and the twittering of swallows ; you hear a slow 
footstep echoing in the cloisters. 

V. 

If Oxford were not the finest thing in England, 
Cambridge would certainly be. Cambridge was so, 
for that matter, to my imagination, for thirty-six 
hours. To the barbaric mind, ambitious of culture, 



xiv.] ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 301 

Oxford is the usual image of the happy reconcilia- 
tion between research and acceptance. It typifies, 
to an American, the union of science and sense — of 
aspiration and ease. A German university gives a 
greater impression of science, and an English country- 
house or an Italian villa a greater impression of idle 
enjoyment ; but in these cases, on one side, know- 
ledge is too rugged, and, on the other, satisfaction is 
too trivial. Oxford lends sweetness to labour and 
dignity to leisure. When I say Oxford, I mean 
Cambridge, for a barbarian is not in the least obliged 
to know the difference, and it suddenly strikes me 
as being both very pedantic and very good-natured 
in him to pretend to know it. What institution is 
more majestic than Trinity College ? what can be 
more touching to an American than the hospitality 
of such an institution ? The first quadrangle is of 
immense extent, and the buildings that surround it, 
with their long, rich fronts of time -deepened gray, 
are the stateliest in the world. In the centre of the 
court are two or three acres of close-shaven lawn, in 
the midst of which rises a splendid gothic fountain, 
where the serving-men fill up their buckets. There 
are towers and battlements and statues, and besides 
these things there are cloisters and gardens and 
bridges. There are charming rooms in a kind of 
stately gate -tower, and the rooms, occupying the 
thickness of the building, have windows looking out 
on one side over the magnificent quadrangle, with half 
a mile or so of Decorated architecture, and on the 
other into deep-bosomed trees. And in the rooms 
is the best company conceivable — distinguished men 
who are remarkably good fellows. I spent a beauti- 



302 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [xiv. 

ful Sunday morning walking about Cambridge, with 
one of these gentlemen, and attempting, as the 
French say, to ddbrouiller its charms. These are a 
very complicated affair, and I do not pretend, in 
memory, to keep the colleges apart. There are, 
however, half a dozen points that make ineffaceable 
pictures. Six or eight of the colleges stand in a 
row, turning their backs to the river; and hereupon 
ensues the loveliest confusion of gothic windows and 
ancient trees, of grassy banks and mossy balustrades, 
of sun-chequered avenues and groves, of lawns and 
gardens and terraces, of single-arched bridges span- 
ning the little stream, which is small and shallow, 
and looks as if it had been " turned on " for orna- 
mental purposes. The scantily-flowing Cam appears 
to exist simply as an occasion for these enchanting 
little bridges — the beautiful covered gallety of 
John's or the slightly-collapsing arch of Clare. In 
the way of college-courts and quiet scholastic porti- 
coes, of gray- walled gardens and ivied nooks of study, 
in all the pictorial accidents of a great English uni- 
versity, Cambridge is delightfully and inexhaustibly 
rich. I looked at these one by one, and said to 
myself always that the last was the best. If I 
were called upon, however, to mention the prettiest 
corner of the world, I should heave a tender sigh 
and point the way to the garden of Trinity Hall. 
My companion, who was very competent to judge 
(but who spoke, indeed, with the partiality of a son 
of the house), declared, as he ushered me into it, 
that it was, to his mind, the most beautiful small 
garden in Europe. I freely accepted, and I promptly 
repeat, an affirmation so ingeniously conditioned. 



XIV.] ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 303 

The little garden at Trinity Hall is narrow and 
crooked ; it leans upon the river, from which a low 
parapet, all muffled in ivy, divides it; it has an 
ancient wall, adorned with a thousand matted creepers 
on one side, and on the other a group of extraordinary 
horse-chestnuts. These trees are of prodigious size ; 
they occupy half the garden, and they are remark- 
able for the fact that their giant limbs strike down 
into the earth, take root again, and emulate, as they 
rise, the majesty of the parent tree. The manner 
in which this magnificent group of horse-chestnuts 
sprawls about over the grass, out into the middle of 
the lawn, is one of the most picturesque features of 
the garden of Trinity Hall. Of course the single 
object at Cambridge that makes the most abiding 
impression is the famous chapel of King's College — 
the most beautiful chapel in England. The effect 
it attempts to produce within belongs to the order 
of sublimity. The attempt succeeds, and the success 
is attained by means so light and elegant that at 
first it almost defeats itself. The sublime usually 
has more of a frown and straddle, and it is not until 
after you have looked about you for ten minutes 
that you perceive that the chapel is saved from 
being the prettiest church in England by the accident 
of its being one of the noblest. It is a cathedral 
without aisles or columns or transepts, but (as a 
compensation) with such a beautiful slinmess of 
clustered tracery soaring along the walls, and 
spreading, bending and commingling in the roof, 
that its simplicity seems only a richness the more. 
I stood there for a quarter of an hour on a Sunday 
morning; there was no service, but in the choir 



304 PORTKAITS OF PLACES. [xiv. 

behind the great screen which divides the chapel in 
half, the young choristers were rehearsing for the 
afternoon. The beautiful boy-voices rose together 
and touched the splendid vault; they hung there, 
expanding and resounding, and then, like a rocket 
that spends itself, they faded and melted toward the 
end of the building. The sound was angelic. 



VI. 

Cambridgeshire is one of the so-called ugly 
counties ; which means that it is observably flat. 
It is for this reason that Newmarket is, in its own 
peculiar fashion, so thriving a locality. The country 
is like a board of green cloth ; the turf presents 
itself as a friendly provision of nature. Nature 
offers her gentle bosom as a gaming-table; card- 
tables, billiard -tables are but a humble imitation of 
Newmarket Heath. It was odd to think that amid 
this gentle, pastoral scenery, there is more betting" 
than anywhere else in the world. The large, neat 
English meadows roll away to a humid-looking sky, 
the young partridges jump about in the hedges, and 
nature does not look in the least as if she were 
offering you odds. The gentlemen do, though — the 
gentlemen whom you meet on the roads and in the 
railway carriage ; they have that indefinable look — 
it pervades a man from the cut of his whisker to 
the shape of his boot -toe — which denotes a 
familiarity with the turf. It is brought home 
to you that to an immense number of people in 
England the events in the Racing Calendar con- 
stitute the most important portion of contemporary 



XIV.] ENGLISH VIGNETTES. 305 

history. The very air about Newmarket appears to 
contain a vague echo of stable-talk, and you perceive 
that this is the landscape depicted in those large 
coloured prints of the " sporting " genus which you 
have admired in inn-parlours. 

The destruction of partridges is, if an equally 
classical, a less licentious pursuit, for which, I 
believe, Cambridgeshire offers peculiar facilities. 
Among these is a certain shooting-box, which is a 
triumph of accidental picturesqueness (the highest 
order) and a temple of delicate hospitality. The 
shooting belongs to the autumn, not to this vernal 
period ; but as I have spoken of echoes, I suppose 
that if I had listened attentively I might have 
heard the ghostly crack of some of the famous shots 
that have been discharged there. The air, I be- 
lieve, had vibrated to several august rifles, but all 
that I happened to hear by listening was some ex- 
cellent talk. 

In England, I said just now, a couple of places 
may be very near together, and yet have what the 
philosophers call a connotation strangely different. 
Only a few miles beyond Newmarket lies Bury St. 
Edmunds, a town whose tranquil antiquity makes 
horse-racing, and even partridge-shooting, appear a 
restless and fidgety mode of passing the time. I 
confess that I went to Bury St. Edmunds simply 
on the strength of its name, which I had often en- 
countered, and which had always seemed to me to 
have a high value for the tourist. I knew that St. 
Edmund had been an Anglo-Saxon worthy, but my 
conviction that the little town that bore his name 
would afford entertainment between trains had 



306 POETKAITS OF PLACES. [xiv. 

nothing definite to rest upon. The event, however, 
rewarded my faith — rewarded it with the sight of a 
magnificent old gatehouse of the thirteenth century, 
the most substantial of many relics of the great 
abbey which once flourished there. There are many 
others ; they are scattered about the old 'precinct of 
the abbey, a large portion of which has been con- 
verted into a rambling botanic garden, the resort at 
Whitsuntide of a thousand very modern merry- 
makers. The monument I speak of has the propor- 
tions of a triumphal arch ; it is at once a gateway 
and a fortress ; it is covered with beautiful ornament, 
and is altogether the lion of Bury. 



XV. 

AN ENGLISH NEW YEAR. 

1879. 

It "will hardly be pretended this year that the 
English Christmas has been a merry one, or that 
the New Year has the promise of being particularly 
happy. The winter is proving very cold and vicious 
— as if nature herself were loath to be left out of 
the general conspiracy against the comfort and self- 
complacency of man. The country at large has a 
sense of embarrassment and depression, which is 
brought home more or less to every class in the 
closely -graduated social hierarchy, and the light of 
Christmas firesides has by no means dispelled the 
gloom. Not that I mean to overstate the gloom. 
It is difficult to imagine any combination of adverse 
circumstances powerful enough to infringe very 
sensibly upon the appearance of activity and pros- 
perity, social stability and luxury, which English 
life must always present to a stranger. Neverthe- 
less, the times are distinctly hard — there is plenty 
of evidence of it — and the spirits of the public are 
not high. The depression of business is extreme 
and universal ; I am ignorant whether it has reached 



308 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xv. 

so calamitous a point as that almost hopeless pros- 
tration of every industry which you have lately 
witnessed in America, and I believe things are by 
no means so bad as they have been on two or three 
occasions within the present century. The possi- 
bility of distress among the lower classes has been 
minimised by the gigantic poor-relief system, which 
is so characteristic a feature of English civilisation, 
and which on particular occasions is supplemented 
(as is the case at present) by private charity pro- 
portionately huge. I notice, too, that in some parts 
of the country discriminating groups of work-people 
have selected these dismal days as a happy time for 
striking. When the labouring classes are able to 
indulge in the luxury of a strike I suppose the 
situation may be said to have its cheerful side. 
There is, however, great distress in the North, and 
there is a general feeling of impecuniosity through- 
out the country. The Daily News has sent a corre- 
spondent to the great industrial regions, and almost' 
every morning for the last three weeks a very 
cleverly- executed picture of the misery of certain 
parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire has been served 
up with the matutinal tea and toast. The work is 
a good one and, I take it, eminently worth doing, 
as it appears to have had a visible effect upon the 
purse-strings of the well-to-do. There is nothing 
more striking in England than the success with 
which an " appeal " is always made. Whatever the 
season or whatever the cause, there always appears 
to be enough money and enough benevolence in the 
country to respond to it in sufficient measure — a 
remarkable fact when one remembers that there is 



XV.] AN ENGLISH NEW YEAK. 309 

never a moment of the year when the custom of 
" appealing " intermits. Equally striking, perhaps, 
is the perfection to which the science of distribut- 
ing charity has been raised — the way it has 
been analysed and explored and made one of the 
exact sciences. One perceives that it has occu- 
pied for a long time a foremost place among 
administrative questions, and has received all the 
light that experience and practice can throw upon 
it. The journal I quoted just now may per- 
haps, without reproach, be credited with a political 
arriere-pensee. It would obviously like its readers 
to supply in this matter of the stagnation of trade 
the missing link between effect and cause — or the 
link which, if not absolutely missing, is at any rate 
difficult to lay one's hand upon. The majority 
in Parliament were not apparently of the opinion 
that the disorganisation of business is the fault of 
Lord Beaconsfield ; but there is no doubt that it is 
a misfortune for the Conservative party that this 
bad state of things coincides very much with its 
tenure of office. When an Administration may be 
invidiously described as " restless," " reckless," and 
" adventurous," and when at the same time business 
is very bad and distress increasing, it requires no 
great ingenuity to represent the former fact as 
responsible for the latter. 

I have spoken of the rigour of the time in the 
lower walks of English life ; and it is not out of 
place to say that among those happier people who 
stand above the reach of material incommodity, the 
Christmas season has been overshadowed sentiment- 
ally — or at least conventionally — by the death of 



310 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [xv. 

Princess Alice. If I had written to you at the 
moment this event occurred I should have been 
tempted to make some general reflections upon it, 
and it is even now perhaps not too late to say that 
there was, to an observer, something very interest- 
ing and characteristic in the manner in which the 
news was received. Broadly speaking, it produced 
much more commotion than I should have expected; 
the papers overflowed with articles on the subject, 
the virtues of the deceased lady and the grief of 
the Queen were elaborately commemorated ; many 
shops, on the day of the Princess's funeral, were 
partially closed, and the whole nation, it may be 
said — or the whole of what professes, in any degree 
whatever, to be "society "—went into mourning, 
There was enough in all this to make a stranger 
consider and interrogate ; and the result of his 
reflections would, I think, have been that, after all 
abatements are made, the monarchy has still a great 
hold upon the affections of the people. The people 
takes great comfort in its royal family. The love 
of social greatness is extraordinarily strong in 
England, and the royal family appeals very con- 
veniently to this sentiment. People in the immense 
obscurity of that middle class which constitutes the 
bulk of the English world like to feel that they are 
related in some degree to something that is socially 
great. They cannot pretend that they are related 
to dukes and earls and people of that sort; but 
they are able to cultivate a certain sense of being 
related to the royal family. They may talk of 
" our " princes and princesses — and the most exalted 
members of the peerage may do no more than that ; 



xv.] AN ENGLISH NEW YEAR. 311 

they may possess photographs of the Queen's chil- 
dren, and read of their daily comings and goings 
with an agreeable sense of property, and without 
incurring that reproach of snobbishness which some- 
times attaches to too eager an interest in the doings 
of the great nobility. There is no reason to suppose 
that the Queen takes the humorous view of this 
situation ; her Majesty is indeed credited with a 
comfortable, motherly confidence in the salutary 
effect of the court -circle upon the mind of the 
middle class ; and there is a kind of general feeling 
that, socially speaking, the Queen and the middle 
class understand each other. There was something 
natural, therefore, in the great impression made by 
the death of a princess who was personally known 
but to an incalculably small proportion of the people 
who mourned for her, and on whose behalf propriety 
would have resented the idea that she could per- 
sonally be missed. It is nevertheless true that 
Lord Beaconsfield is felt rather to have overdone 
his part in announcing the event to the House of 
Lords in language in which he might have pro- 
claimed some great national catastrophe. I was 
told by a person who was present that the House 
felt itself to be at the mercy of his bad taste — that 
men looked at each other with a blush and a kind 
of shudder, and asked each other what was coming 
next. He remarked, among other things, that the 
manner in which the Princess Alice had contracted 
her fatal illness (her tender imprudence in kissing 
her sick children) was an act worthy to be com- 
memorated in art — "in painting, in sculpture, and 
in gems." I have heard these last two words 



312 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [xv. 

wittily quoted in illustration of his Semitic origin. 
An ordinarily florid speaker would have contented 
himself with saying " in painting and in sculpture." 
The addition "in gems" betrays the genius of the 
race which supplies the world with pawnbrokers. 

I left town a short time before Christmas and 
went to spend the festive season in the North, in a 
part of the country with which I was unacquainted. 
It was quite possible to absent one's self from 
London without a sense of sacrifice, for the charms 
of the metropolis during the last several weeks have 
been obscured by peculiarly atrocious weather. 
It is, of course, a very old story that London is 
foggy, and this simple statement is not of necessity 
alarming. But there are fogs and fogs, and these 
murky visitations, during the present winter, have 
been of the least tolerable sort. The fog that draws 
down and absorbs the smoke of the housetops, 
causes it to hang about the streets in impenetrable 
density, forces it into one's eyes and down one's 
throat, so that one is half- blinded and quite 
sickened — this atmospheric abomination has been 
much more frequent than usual. Just before 
Christmas, too, there was a heavy snow-storm, and 
even a tolerably light fall of snow has London 
quite at its mercy. The emblem of purity is almost 
immediately converted into a sticky, lead -coloured 
mush, the cabs skulk out of sight or take up their 
stations before the lurid windows of a public-house, 
which glares through the sleety darkness at the 
desperate wayfarer with an air of vulgar bravado. 
This state of things in the London streets made a 
rather sorry Christmas, though I believe the Christ- 



XV.] AN ENGLISH NEW YEAR. 313 

mas hearth is supposed to burn the more "brightly 
in proportion as the outer world is less attractive. 
The wonderful London shops were, of course, duly 
transfigured, but they seemed to me, for the most 
part, to have an aspect of vain expectation, and I 
hear that their proprietors give a melancholy account 
of the profits of the season. It was only at a certain 
charming little French establishment in Bond Street 
that I observed any great activity — a little choco- 
late-shop where light-fingered young women from 
Paris dispense the most wonderful bonbonnieres. 

To keep one's self in good humour with English 
civilisation, however, one must do what I alluded 
to just now — one must go into the country ; one 
must limit one's horizon, for the time, to the spacious 
walls of one of those admirable homes which at this 
season overflow with hospitality and good cheer. 
By this means the result is triumphantly attained 
— these are conditions that you cordially appreciate. 
Of all the great things that the English have invented 
and made a part of the glory of the national char- 
acter, the most perfect, the most characteristic, the 
one they have mastered most completely in all its 
details, so that it has become a compendious illus- 
tration of their social genius and their manners, is 
the well-appointed, well -administered, well -filled 
country-house. The grateful stranger makes these 
reflections — and others besides — as he wanders 
about in the beautiful library of such a dwelling of 
an inclement winter afternoon just at the hour when 
six o'clock tea is impending. Such a place and 
such a time abound in agreeable episodes ; but I 
suspect that the episode from which, a fortnight 



314 PORTEAITS OF PLACES. [xv. 

ago, I received the most ineffaceable impression was 
but indirectly connected with the charms of a luxu- 
rious fireside. The country I speak of was a popu- 
lous manufacturing region, full of tall chimneys and 
of an air that is gray and gritty. A lady had made 
a present of a Christmas-tree to the children of a 
workhouse, and she invited me to go with her and 
assist at the distribution of the toys. There was a 
drive through the early dusk of a very cold Christ- 
mas eve, followed by the drawing-up of a lamp-lit 
brougham in the snowy quadrangle of a grim-look- 
ing charitable institution. I had never been in an 
English workhouse before, and this one transported 
me, with the aid of memory, to the early pages 
of Oliver Twist. We passed through certain cold, 
bleak passages, to which an odour of suet-pudding, 
the aroma of Christmas cheer, failed to impart an 
air of hospitality ; and then, after waiting a while 
in a little parlour appertaining to the superintendent, 
where the remainder of a dinner of by no means 
eleemosynary simplicity and the attitude of a gentle- 
man asleep with a flushed face on the sofa seemed 
to effect a tacit exchange of references, we were 
ushered into a large frigid refectory, chiefly illumined 
by the twinkling tapers of the Christmas-tree. Here 
entered to us some hundred and fifty little children 
of charity, who had been making a copious dinner, 
and who brought with them an atmosphere of hunger 
memorably satisfied — together with other traces of 
the occasion upon their pinafores and their small 
red faces. I have said that the place reminded 
me of Oliver Twist, and I glanced through this little 
herd for an infant figure that should look as if it 



XV.] AN ENGLISH NEW YEAR. 315 

were cut out for romantic adventures. But they 
were all very prosaic little mortals. They were 
made of very common clay indeed, and a certain 
number of them were idiotic. They filed up and 
received their little offerings, and then they com- 
pressed • themselves into a tight infantine bunch, 
and lifting up their small hoarse voices, directed a 
melancholy hymn toward their benefactress. The 
scene was a picture I shall not forget, with its 
curious mixture of poetry and sordid prose — the 
dying wintry light in the big, bare, stale room ; the 
beautiful Lady Bountiful, standing in the twinkling 
glory of the Christmas-tree ; the little multitude of 
staring and wondering, yet perfectly expressionless, 
faces. 



XVI. 

AN ENGLISH WINTER 
WATERING-PLACE. 

1879. 

I have just been spending a couple of days at a 
well-known resort upon the Kentish coast, and 
though such an exploit is by no means unpre- 
cedented, yet, as to the truly observing mind no 
opportunity is altogether void and no impressions 
are wholly valueless, I have it on my conscience to 
make a note of my excursion. Superficially speaking,' 
it was certainly wanting in originality ; but I am 
afraid that it afforded me as much entertainment as 
if the idea of paying a visit to Hastings had been 
an invention of my own. This is so far from being 
the case that the most striking feature of the town 
in question is the immense provision made there for 
the entertainment of visitors. Hastings and St. 
Leonard's, standing side by side, present a united 
sea-front of more miles in length than I shall venture 
to compute. It is sufficient that in going from one 
end of the place to the other I had a greater sense 
of having taken a long, straight walk, than I had 
done since I last measured the remarkable length of 



XVI.] AN ENGLISH WINTEK WATERING-PLACE. 317 

Broadway. This is not a strikingly picturesque 
image, and it must be confessed that the beauty of 
Hastings does not reside in a soft irregularity or a 
rural exuberance. Like all the larger English 
watering-places it is simply a little London super 
mare. "The pictorial is always to be found in Eng- 
land if one will take the trouble of looking for it ; 
but it must be conceded that at Hastings this ele- 
ment is less obtrusive than it might be. I had 
heard it described as a " dull Brighton," and this 
description had been intended to dispose of the 
place. In fact, however — such is the perversity of 
the inquiring mind — it had rather quickened than 
quenched my interest. It occurred to me that it 
might be entertaining to follow out the variations 
and modifications of Brighton. Four or five miles 
of lodging-houses and hotels staring at the sea 
across a " parade " adorned with iron benches, with 
hand -organs and German bands, with nursemaids 
t\nd British babies, with ladies and gentleman of 
leisure — looking rather embarrassed with it, and 
trying, rather unsuccessfully, to get rid of it — this 
is the great feature which Brighton and Hastings 
have in common. At Brighton there is a certain 
variety and gaiety of colour — something suggesting 
crookedness and yellow paint — which gives the 
place a kind of cheerful, easy, more or less vulgar, 
foreign air. But Hastings is very gray and sober 
and English, and, indeed, it is because it seemed to 
me so English that I gave my best attention to it. 
If one is attempting to gather impressions of a 
people and to learn to know them, everything is 
interesting that is characteristic, quite apart from its 



318 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xvi. 

being beautiful. English manners are made up of 
such a multitude of small details that the portrait a 
stranger has privately sketched in is always liable 
to receive new touches. And this, indeed, is the 
explanation of his noting a great many small points, 
on the spot, with a degree of relish and appreciation 
which must often, to persons who are not in his posi- 
tion, appear exaggerated. He has formed a mental pic- 
ture of the civilisation of the people he lives among, 
and whom, when he has a great deal of courage, he 
makes bold to say he is " studying ;" he has drawn 
up a kind of tabular view of their manners and 
customs, their idiosyncrasies, their social institutions, 
their general features and properties ; and when 
once he has suspended this rough cartoon in the 
chambers of his imagination, he finds a great deal 
of occupation in touching it up and filling it in. 
Wherever he goes, whatever he sees, he adds a few 
strokes. That is how I spent my time at Hastings. 
I found it, for instance, a question more interest- 
ing than it might superficially appear, to choose 
between the inns — between the Eoyal Hotel upon 
the Parade and an ancient hostel — a survival of the 
posting-days — in a side-street. A friend had de- 
scribed the latter establishment to me as " mellow," 
and this epithet complicated the problem. The 
term mellow, as applied to an inn, is the compara- 
live degree of a state of things of which (say) 
" musty " would be the superlative. If you can 
seize this tendency in its comparative stage you may 
do very well indeed ; the trouble is that, like all 
tendencies, it contains, even in its earlier phases, the 
germs of excess. I thought it very possible that 



XVI.] AN ENGLISH WINTER WATERING-PLACE. 319 

the Swan would be over -ripe; but I thought it 
equally probable that the Eoyal would be crude. I 
could claim a certain acquaintance with " royal " 
hotels — I knew just how they were constituted. I 
foresaw the superior young woman sitting at a 
ledger, in a kind of glass cage, at the bottom of the 
Btairs, and expressing by refined intonations her 
contempt for a gentleman who should decline to 
"require" a sitting-room. The functionary whom 
in America we know and dread as an hotel-clerk 
belongs in England to the sex which, when need be, 
has an even more perfect command of the super- 
cilious. Large hotels here are almost always owned 
and carried on by companies, and the company is 
represented by a well-shaped female figure belonging 
to the class whose members are more particularly 
known as " persons." The chambermaid is a young 
woman, and the female tourist is a lady; but the 
occupant of the glass cage, who hands you your key 
and assigns you your apartment, is designated in the 
manner I have mentioned. The " person " has 
various methods of revenging herself for her shadowy 
position in the social scale, and I think it was from 
a vague recollection of having on former occasions 
felt the weight of her embittered spirit that I deter- 
mined to seek the hospitality of the humbler inn, 
where it was probable that one who was himself 
humble would enjoy a certain consideration. In 
the event, I was rather oppressed by the feather- 
bed quality of the welcome extended to me at the 
Swan. Once established there, in a sitting-room 
(after all), the whole affair was as characteristically 
English as I could desire. 



320 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [xvi. 

I have sometimes had occasion to repine at the 
meagreness and mustiness of the old-fashioned Eng- 
lish inn, and to feel that in poetry and in fiction 
these defects had been culpably glossed over. But 
I said to myself the other evening that there is a 
kind of venerable decency even in some of its 
dingiest idiosyncrasies, and that in an age of vul- 
garisation one should do justice to an institution 
which is still more or less of a stronghold of the 
ancient amenities. It is a satisfaction in moving 
about the world to be treated as a gentleman, and 
this gratification appears to be more than, in the 
light of modern science, a Company can profitably 
undertake to bestow. I have an old friend, a per- 
son of admirably conservative instincts, from whom, 
a short time since, I borrowed a hint of this kind. 
This lady had been staying at a small inn in the 
country, with her daughter ; the daughter, whom 
we shall call Mrs. B., had left the house a few days 
before the mother. " Did you like the place ? " I 
asked of my friend ; " was it comfortable ? " " Xo, 
it was not comfortable ; but I liked it. It was 
shabby, and I was much overcharged; but it pleased 
me." "What was the mysterious charm?" "Well, 
when I was coming away, the landlady — she had 
cheated me horribly — came to my carriage, and 
dropped a curtsey, and said : ' My duty to Mrs. B., 
ma'am.' Que voulez-vous ? That pleased me." 
There was an old waiter at Hastings who would 
have been capable of that — an old waiter who had 
been in the house for forty years, and who was not 
so much an individual waiter as the very spirit 
and genius, the incarnation and tradition of waiter- 



Jtvi.] AN ENGLISn WINTER WATERING-PLACE. 321 

hood. He was faded and weary and rheumatic, but 
he had a sort of mixture of the paternal and the 
deferential, the philosophic and the punctilious, 
which seemed but grossly requited by a present of 
a small coin. I am not fond of jugged hare for 
dinner, either as a light entrie or as a pi&ce de resist- 
ance ; but this accomplished attendant had the art 
of presenting you such a dish in a manner that 
persuaded you, for the time, that it was worthy of 
your serious consideration. The hare, by the way, 
before being subjected to the mysterious operation of 
jugging, might have been seen dangling from a hook 
in the bar of the inn, together with a choice collection 
of other viands. You might peruse the bill of fare 
in an elementary form as you passed in and out of 
the house, and make up your menu for the day by 
poking with your stick at a juicy-looking steak or 
a promising fowl. The landlord and his spouse 
were always on the threshold of the bar, polishing 
a brass candlestick and paying you their respects ; 
the place was pervaded by an aroma of rum-and- 
water and of commercial travellers' jokes. 

This description, however, is lacking in the 
element of gentility, and I will not pursue it 
farther, for I should give a very false impression 
of Hastings if I were to omit so characteristic a 
feature. It was, I think, the element of gentility 
that most impressed me. I know that the word. I 
have just ventured to use is under the ban of con- 
temporary taste ; so I may as well say outright that 
I regard it as indispensable in almost any attempt at 
portraiture of English manners. It is vain for an 
observer of such things to pretend to get on with- 

Y 



322 POKTKAITS OF PLACES. [xvi, 

out it. One may talk of foreign life indefinitely — 
of the manners and customs of France, Germany, 
and Italy — and never feel the need of this sugges- 
tive, yet mysteriously discredited, epithet. One 
may survey the remarkable face of American civi- 
lisation without finding occasion to strike this par- 
ticular note. But in England no circumlocution 
will serve — the note must be definitely struck. To 
attempt to speak of an English watering-place in 
winter and yet pass it over in silence, would be to 
forfeit all claims to analytic talent. For a stranger, 
at any rate, the term is invaluable — it is more 
convenient than I should find easy to say. It is 
instantly evoked in my mind by long rows of 
smuttily -plastered houses, with a card inscribed 
" Apartments " suspended in the window of the 
ground-floor sitting-room — that portion of the dwell- 
ing which is known in lodging-house parlance as 
"the parlours." Everything, indeed, suggests it — 
the bath-chairs, drawn up for hire in a melancholy 
row ; the innumerable and excellent shops, adorned 
with the latest photographs of the royal family and 
of Mrs. Langtry ; the little reading-room and circu- 
lating library on the Parade, where the daily papers, 
neatly arranged, may be perused for a trifling fee, 
and the novels of the season are stacked away 
like the honeycombs in an apiary ; the long pier, 
stretching out into the sea, to which you are admit- 
ted by the payment of a penny at a wicket, and 
where you may enjoy the music of an indefatigable 
band, the enticements of several little stalls for the 
sale of fancy-work, and the personal presence of 
good local society. It is only the winking, twink 



xvi.] AN ENGLISH WINTER WATERING-PLACE. 323 

ling, easily-rippling sea that is not genteel. But, 
really, I was disposed to say at Hastings that if the 
sea were not genteel, so much the worse for Nep- 
tune ; for it was the favourable aspect of the great 
British proprieties and solemnities that struck me. 
Hastings and St. Leonards, with their long, warm sea- 
front, and their multitude of small, cheap comforts 
and conveniences, offer a kind of resume of middle- 
class English civilisation and of advantages of which 
it would ill become an American to make light. I 
don't suppose that life at Hastings is the most ex- 
citing or the most gratifying in the world, but it 
must certainly have its advantages. If I were a 
quiet old lady of modest income and nice habits — 
or even a quiet old gentleman of the same pattern 
— I should certainly go to Hastings. There, amid 
the little shops and the little libraries, the bath- 
chairs and the German bands, the Parade and the 
long Pier, with a mild climate, a moderate scale of 
prices, and the consciousness of a high civilisation, 
I should enjoy a seclusion which would have nothing 
nrimitive or crude. 



XVII. 
SARATOGA. 

1870. 

The sentimental tourist makes images in advance ; 
they grow up in his mind by a logic of their own. 
He finds himself thinking of an unknown, unseen 
place, as having such and such a shape and figure 
rather than such another. It assumes in his 
mind a certain complexion, a certain colour which 
frequently turns out to be singularly at variance 
with reality. For some reason or other, I had sup- 
posed Saratoga to be buried in a sort of elegant 
wilderness. I imagined a region of shady forest 
drives, with a bright, broad-terraced hotel gleaming 
here and there against a background of mysterious 
groves and glades. I had made a cruelly small 
allowance for the stern vulgarities of life — for the 
shops and sidewalks and loafers, the complex 
machinery of a city of pleasure. The fault was so 
wholly my own that it is quite without bitterness 
that I proceed to affirm that the Saratoga of experi- 
ence is sadly different from this. I confess, how- 
ever, that it has always seemed to me that one's 
visions, on the whole, gain more than they lose by 



xvn.] SARATOGA. 325 

being transmuted into fact. There is an essential 
indignity in indefiniteness ; you cannot allow for 
accidents and details until you have seen them. 
They give more to the imagination than they receive 
from it. I frankly admit, therefore, that the Sara- 
toga of reality is a much more satisfactory place 
than the all-too-primitiVe Elysium I had constructed. 
It is indeed, as I say, immensely different. There 
is a vast number of brick — nay, of asphalt — side- 
walks, a great many shops, and a magnificent array 
of loafers. But what indeed are you to do at Sara- 
toga — the morning draught having been achieved — 
unless you loaf ? " Que faire en un gtte a moins que 
Ton ne songe ? " Loafers being assumed, of course 
shops and sidewalks follow. The main avenue of 
Saratoga does not scruple to call itself Broadway. 
The untravelled reader may form a very accurate 
idea of it by recalling as distinctly as possible, not 
indeed the splendours of that famous thoroughfare, 
but the secondary charms of the Sixth Avenue. The 
place has what the French would call the "accent" 
of the Sixth Avenue. Its two main features are 
the two monster hotels which stand facing each 
other along a goodly portion of its course. One, I 
believe, is considered much better than the other, — 
less of a monster and more of a refuge, — but in 
appearance there is little choice between them. 
Both are immense brick structures, directly on the 
crowded, noisy street, with vast covered piazzas 
running along the facade, supported by great iron 
posts. The piazza of the Union Hotel, I have been 
repeatedly informed, is the largest " in the world." 
There are a number of objects in Saratoga, by the 



326 PORTKAITS OF PLACES. [xvn. 

way, which in their respective kinds are the finest 
in the world. One of these is Mr. John Morrissey's 
casino. I bowed my head submissively to this 
statement, but privately I thought of the blue Medi- 
terranean, and the little white promontory of Monaco, 
and the silver-gray verdure of olives, and the view 
across the outer sea toward the bosky cliffs of Italy. 
The Congress waters, too, it is well known, are excel- 
lent in the superlative degree; this I am perfectly 
willing to maintain. 

The piazzas of these great hotels may very well 
be the biggest of all piazzas. They have not archi- 
tectural beauty ; but they doubtless serve their pur- 
pose — that of affording sitting-space in the open air 
to an immense number of persons. They are, of 
course, quite the best places to observe the Saratoga 
world. In the evening, when the "boarders" have 
all come forth and seated themselves in groups, or 
have begun to stroll in (not always, I regret to say, 
to the sad detriment of the dramatic interest, bi>- 
sexual) couples, the big heterogeneous scene affords 
a great deal of entertainment. Seeing it for the 
first time, the observer is likely to assure himself 
that he has neglected an important item in the 
sum of American manners. The rough brick wall 
of the house, illumined by a line of flaring gas-lights, 
forms a natural background to the crude, imperma- 
nent, discordant tone of the assembly. In the 
larger of the two hotels, a series of long windows 
open into an immense parlour — the largest, I sup- 
pose, in the world, and the most scantily furnished 
in proportion to its size. A few dozen rocking- 
chairs, an equal number of small tables, tripods to 



XVII.] SARATOGA. 327 

the eternal ice-pitcher, serve chiefly to emphasise 
the vacuous grandeur of the spot. On the piazza, 
in the outer multitude, ladies largely prevail, both 
by numbers and (you are not slow to perceive) by 
distinction of appearance. The good old times of 
Saratoga; I believe, as of the world in general, are 
rapidly passing away. The time was when it was 
the chosen resort of none but " nice people." At 
the present day, I hear it constantly affirmed, " the 
company is dreadfully mixed." What society may 
have been at Saratoga when its elements were thus 
simple and severe, I can only vaguely and mourn- 
fully conjecture. I confine myself to the dense, 
democratic, vulgar Saratoga of the current year. 
You are struck, to begin with, at the hotels, by 
the numerical superiority of the women ; then, I 
think, by their personal superiority. It is incon- 
testably the case that in appearance, in manner, in 
grace and completeness of aspect, American women 
surpass their husbands and brothers; the relation 
being reversed among some of the nations of Europe. 
Attached to the main entrance of the Union Hotel, 
and adjoining the ascent from the street to the 
piazza, is a " stoop " of mighty area, which, at most 
hours of the day and evening, is a favoured lounging- 
place of men. I should add, after the remark I 
have just made, that even in the appearance of the 
usual American male there seems to me to be a 
certain plastic intention. It is true that the lean, 
sallow, angular Yankee of tradition is dignified 
mainly by a look of decision, a hint of unimpas- 
sioned volition, the air of " smartness." This in 
some degree redeems him, but it fails to make him 



328 PORTKAITS OF PLACES. [xvil. 

handsome. But in the average American of the 
present time, the typical leanness and sallowness are 
less than in his fathers, and the individual acute- 
ness is at once equally marked and more frequently 
united with merit of form. Casting your eye over 
a group of your fellow-citizens in the portico of the 
Union Hotel, you will be inclined to admit that, 
taking the good with the bad, they are worthy sons 
of the great Eepublic. I have found, at any rate, 
a great deal of entertainment in watching them. 
They suggest to my fancy the swarming vastness — 
the multifarious possibilities and activities — of our 
young civilisation. They come from the uttermost 
ends of the Union — from San Francisco, from 
New Orleans, from Alaska. As they sit with their 
white hats tilted forward, and their chairs tilted 
back, and their feet tilted up, and their cigars and 
toothpicks forming various angles with these various 
lines, I seem to see in their faces a tacit reference 
to the affairs of a continent. They are obviously 
persons of experience — of a somewhat narrow and 
monotonous experience certainly ; an experience of 
which the diamonds and laces which their wives 
are exhibiting hard by are, perhaps, the most sub- 
stantial and beautiful result ; but, at any rate, they 
have lived, in every fibre of the will. For the time, 
they are lounging with the negro waiters, and the 
boot-blacks, and the news-vendors ; but it was 
not in lounging that they gained their hard 
wrinkles and the level impartial regard which they 
direct from beneath their hat-rims. They are not 
the mellow fruit of a society which has walked 
hand-in-hand with tradition and culture ; they are 



xvii.] SARATOGA. 329 

hard nuts, which have grown and ripened as they 
could,. When they talk among themselves, I seem 
to hear the cracking of the shells. 

If the men are remarkable, the ladies are wonder- 
ful. Saratoga is famous, I believe, as the place of 
all places in America where women adorn them- 
selves most, or as the place, at least, where the 
greatest amount of dressing may be seen by the 
greatest number of people. Your first impression is 
therefore of the — what shall I call it ? — of the 
abundance of petticoats. Every woman you meet, 
young or old, is attired with a certain amount of 
richness, and with whatever good taste may be com- 
patible with such a mode of life. You behold an 
interesting, indeed a quite momentous spectacle ; the 
democratisation of elegance. If I am to believe what 
I hear — in fact, I may say what I overhear — many 
of these sumptuous persons have enjoyed neither the 
advantages of a careful education nor the privileges of 
an introduction to society. She walks more or less 
of a queen, however, each uninitiated nobody. She 
often has, in dress, an admirable instinct of elegance 
and even of what the French call " chic." This 
instinct occasionally amounts to a sort of passion ; 
the result then is wonderful. You look at the coarse 
brick walls, the rusty iron posts of the piazza, at the 
shuffling negro waiters, the great tawdry steamboat- 
cabin of a drawing-room — you see the tilted ill- 
dressed loungers on the steps — and you finally regret 
that a figure so exquisite should have so vulgar a set- 
ting. Your resentment, however, is speedily tempered 
by reflection. You feel the impertinence of your old 
reminiscences of English and French novels,and of the 



330 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xvn. 

dreary social order in which privacy was the presid- 
ing genius and women arrayed themselves for the 
appreciation of the few. The crowd, the tavern- 
loungers, the surrounding ugliness and tumult and 
license, constitute the social medium of the young 
lady you are so inconsistent as to admire; she is 
dressed for publicity. The thought fills you with a 
kind of awe. The social order of tradition is far 
away indeed, and as for the transatlantic novels, you 
begin to doubt whether she is so amiably curious as 
to read even the silliest of them. To be dressed up 
to the eyes is obviously to give pledges to idleness. 
I have been forcibly struck with the apparent ab- 
sence of any warmth and richness of detail in the hives 
of these wonderful ladies of the piazzas. We are 
freely accused of being an eminently wasteful people ; 
and I know of few things which so largely warrant 
the accusation as the fact that these conspicuous 
dUgantes adorn themselves, socially speaking, to so 
little purpose. To dress for every one is, practically, 
to dress for no one. There are few prettier sights 
than a charmingly-dressed woman, gracefully estab- 
lished in some shady spot, with a piece of needle- 
work or embroidery, or a book. Nothing very 
serious is accomplished, probably, but an aesthetic 
principle is recognised. The embroidery and the 
book are a tribute to culture, and I suppose they 
really figure somewhere out of the opening scenes of 
French comedies. But here at Saratoga, at any 
hour of morning or evening, you may see a hundred 
rustling beauties whose rustle is their sole occupa- 
tion. One lady in particular there is, with whom 
it appears to be an inexorable fate that she shall 



xvn.] SARATOGA. 331 

be nothing more than dressed. Her apparel is 
tremendously modern, and my remarks would be 
much illumined if I had the learning necessary for 
describing it. I can only say that every evening 
for a fortnight she has revealed herself as a fresh 
creation. ' But she especially, as I say, has struck 
me as a person dressed beyond her life and her 
opportunities. I resent on her behalf — or on behalf 
at least of her finery — the extreme severity of her 
circumstances. What is she, after all, but a "regular 
boarder"? She ought to sit on the terrace of a 
stately castle, with a great baronial park shutting 
out the undressed world, and bandy quiet small-talk 
with an ambassador or a duke. My imagination is 
shocked when I behold her seated in gorgeous relief 
against the dusty clapboards of the hotel, with her 
beautiful hands folded in her silken lap, her head 
drooping slightly beneath the weight of her chignon, 
her lips parted in a vague contemplative gaze at 
Mr. Helmbold's well-known advertisement on the 
opposite fence, her husband beside her reading the 
New York Herald. 

I have indeed observed cases of a sort of splendid 
social isolation here, which are not without a certain 
amount of pathos — people who know no one, who 
have money and finery and possessions, only no 
friends. Such at least is my inference, from the 
lonely grandeur with which I see them invested. 
Women, of course, are the most helpless victims of 
this cruel situation, although it must be said that 
they befriend each other with a generosity for which 
we hardly give them credit. I have seen women, 
for instance, at various " hops," approach their 



332 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xvil 

lonely sisters and invite them to waltz, and I have 
seen the fair invited surrender themselves eagerly 
to this humiliating embrace. Gentlemen at Sara- 
toga are at a much higher premium than at European 
watering-places. It is an old story that in this 
country we have no " leisure-class " — the class from 
which the Saratogas of Europe recruit a large number 
of their male frequenters. A few months ago, I paid 
a visit to an English "bath," commemorated in vari- 
ous works of fiction, where, among many visible 
points of difference from American resorts, the most 
striking was the multitude of young men who had 
the whole day on their hands. While their sweet- 
hearts and sisters are waltzing together, our own 
young men are rolling up greenbacks in counting- 
houses and stores. . I was recently reminded in 
another way, one evening, of the unlikeness of Sara- 
toga to Cheltenham. Behind the biggest of the big 
hotels is a large planted yard, which it is the fashion 
at Saratoga to talk of as a " park," and which is 
perhaps believed to be the biggest in the world. At 
one end of it stands a great ballroom, approached 
by a range of wooden steps. It was late in the 
evening ; the room, in spite of the intense heat, was 
blazing with light and the orchestra thundering a 
mighty waltz. A group of loungers, including myself, 
were hanging about to watch the ingress of the fest- 
ally-minded. In the basement of the edifice, sunk 
beneath the ground, a noisy auctioneer, in his shirt 
and trousers, black in the face with heat and voci- 
feration, was selling " pools " of the races to a dense 
group of frowsy betting -men. At the foot of the 
steps was stationed a man in a linen coat and straw 



xvii.] ' SAKATOGA. 333 

hat, without waistcoat or necktie, to take the tickets 
of the ball-goers. As the latter failed to arrive in 
sufficient numbers, a musician came forth to the top 
of the steps and blew a loud summons on a horn. 
After this they began to straggle along. On this 
occasion, -certainly, the company promised to be de- 
cidedly " mixed." The women, as usual, were much 
bedizened, though without any constant adhesion to 
the technicalities of full-dress. The men adhered to 
it neither in the letter nor the spirit. The possessor 
of a pair of satin -shod feet, twinkling beneath an 
uplifted volume of gauze and lace and flowers, tripped 
up the steps with her gloved hand on the sleeve of 
a railway " duster." Now and then two ladies arrived 
alone ; generally a group of them approached under 
convoy of a single man. Children were freely scat- 
tered among their elders, and frequently a small boy 
would deliver his ticket and enter the glittering 
portal, beautifully unembarrassed Of the children 
of Saratoga there would be wondrous things to relate. 
I believe that, in spite of their valuable aid, the 
festival of which I speak was rated rather a " fizzle." 
I see it advertised that they are soon to have, for 
their own peculiar benefit, a " Masquerade and Pro- 
menade Concert, beginning at 9 p.m." I observe 
that they usually open the " hops," and that it is 
only after their elders have borrowed confidence 
from the sight of their unfaltering paces that the 
latter dare to dance. You meet them far into the 
evening, roaming over the piazzas and corridors of 
the hotels — the little girls especially — lean, pale, 
formidable. Occasionally childhood confesses itself, 
even when maternity resists, and you see at eleven 



334 PORTRAITS OF PLACES: [xvil. 

o'clock at night some poor little bedizened precocity- 
collapsed in slumber in a lonely wayside chair. The 
part played by children in society here is only an 
additional instance of the wholesale equalisation of 
the various social atoms which is the distinctive 
feature of collective Saratoga. A man in a " duster " 
at a ball is as good as a man in regulation-garments ; 
a young woman dancing with another young woman 
is as good as a young woman dancing with a young 
man ; a child of ten is as good as a woman of thirty ; 
a double negative in conversation is rather better 
than a single. 

An important feature in many a watering-place 
is the facility for leaving it a little behind you and 
tasting of the unmitigated country. You may wan- 
der to some shady hillside and sentimentalise upon 
the vanity of a high civilisation. But at Saratoga 
civilisation holds you fast. The most important 
feature of the place, perhaps, is the impossibility of 
carrying out any such pastoral dream. The sur- 
rounding country is a charming wilderness, but the 
roads are so abominably bad that walking and driv- 
ing are alike unprofitable. Of course, however, if 
you are bent upon a walk, you will take a walk. 
There is a striking contrast between the concentrated 
prodigality of life in the immediate neighbourhood 
of the hotels and the pastoral solitudes into which a 
walk of half an hour may lead you. You have left 
the American citizen and his wife, the orchestras, 
the pools, the precocious infants, the cocktails, the 
importations from Worth, but a mile or two behind, 
but already the forest is primeval and the land- 
scape is without figures. Nothing could be less 



SVil.] SARATOGA. 335 

manipulated than the country about Saratoga. The 
heavy roads are little more than sandy wheel-tracks ; 
by the tangled wayside the blackberries wither un- 
picked. The horizon undulates with an air of having 
it all its own way. There are no white villages 
gleaming in the distance, no spires of ch arches, no 
salient details. It is all green, lonely, and vacant. If 
you wish to enjoy a detail, you must stop beneath a 
cluster of pines and listen to the murmur of the softly- 
troubled air, or follow upward the scaly straightness 
of their trunks to where the afternoon light gives it a 
colour. Here and there on a slope by the roadside 
stands a rough unpainted farmhouse, looking as if its 
dreary blackness were the result of its standing dark 
and lonely amid so many months — and such a wide 
expanse — of winter snow. It has turned black by 
contrast. The principal feature of the grassy un- 
furnished yard is the great wood-pile, telling grimly 
of the long reversion of the summer. For the time, 
however, it looks down contentedly enough over a 
goodly appanage of grain-fields and orchards, and I 
can fancy that it may be amusing to be a boy there. 
But to be a man, it must be quite what the lean, 
brown, serious farmers physiognomically hint it to 
be. You have, however, at the present season, for 
your additional beguilement, on the eastern horizon, 
the vision of the long bold chain of the Green Moun- 
tains, clad in that single coat of simple, candid blue 
which is the favourite garment of our American hills. 
As &. visitor, too, you have for an afternoon's excur- 
sion your choice between a couple of lakes. Saratoga 
Lake, the larger and more distant of the two, is the 
goal of the regular afternoon drive. Above the 



336 PORTEAITS OF PLA.CES. [xvil. 

shore is a well-appointed tavern — " Moon's " it is 
called by the voice of fame — where you may sit 
upon a broad piazza and partake of fried potatoes 
and " drinks ;" the latter, if you happen to have 
come from poor dislicensed Boston, a peculiarly 
gratifying privilege. You enjoy the felicity sighed 
for by that wanton Italian lacjy of the anecdote, 
when, one summer evening, to the sound of music, 
she wished that to eat an ice were a sin. The other 
lake is small, and its shores are unadorned by any 
edifice but a boat-house, where you may hire a skiff 
and pull yourself out into the minnow-tickled, wood- 
circled oval. Here, floating in its darkened half, 
while you watch on the opposite shore the tree- 
stems, white and sharp in the declining sunlight, 
and their foliage whitening and whispering in the 
breeze, and you feel that this little solitude is part 
of a greater and more portentous solitude, you may 
recall certain passages of Euskin, in which he dwells 
upon the needfulness of some human association, 
however remote, to make natural scenery fully im- 
pressive. You may recall that magnificent page in 
Which he relates having tried with such fatal effect, 
in a battle-haunted valley of the Jura, to fancy him- 
self in a nameless solitude of our own continent. 
You feel around you, with irresistible force, the elo- 
quent silence of undedicated nature — the absence of 
serious associations, the nearness, indeed, of the 
vulgar and trivial associations of the least complete 
of all the cities of pleasure — you feel this, and you 
wonder what it is you so deeply and calmly enjoy, 
lou make up your mind, possibly, that it is a great 



XVII.] SARATOGA. 337 

advantage to be able at once to enjoy Mr. Euskin 
and to enjoy Mr. Buskin's alarms. And hereupon 
you return to your hotel and read the New York 
papers on the plan of the French campaign and the 
Nathan murder. 



XVIII. 

NEWPOKT. 

1870. 

The season at Newport has an obstinate life. Sep- 
tember has fairly begun, but as yet there is small 
visible diminution in the steady stream — the splendid, 
stupid stream — of carriages which rolls in the after- 
noon along the Avenue. There is, I think, a far 
more intimate fondness between Newport and its 
frequenters than that which in most American 
watering-places consecrates the somewhat mechanical 
relation between the visitors and the visited. This 
relation here is for the most part slightly sentimen- 
tal. I am very far from professing a cynical con- 
tempt for the gaieties and vanities of Newport life : 
they are, as a spectacle, extremely amusing ; they 
are full of a certain warmth of social colour which 
charms alike the eye and the fancy ; they are worth 
observing, if only to conclude against them ; they 
possess at least the dignity of all extreme and em- 
phatic expressions of a social tendency ; but they are 
not so untouched with Philistinism that I do not 
seem to overhear at times the still, small voice of 
this tender sense of the sweet, superior beauty of the 



xviii.] NEWPOKT. 339 

natural things that surround them, pleading gently 
in their favour to the fastidious critic. I feel almost 
warranted in saying that here the background of life 
has sunk less in relative value and suffered less from 
the encroachments of pleasure-seeking man than the 
scenic dispositions of any other watering-place. For 
this, perhaps, we may thank rather the modest, in- 
corruptible integrity of the Newport landscape than 
any very intelligent forbearance on the part of the 
summer colony. The beauty of this landscape is so 
subtle, so essential, so humble, so much a thing of 
character and expression, so little a thing of feature 
and pretension, that it cunningly eludes the grasp of 
the destroyer or the reformer, and triumphs in 
impalpable purity even when it seems to make eon- 
cessions. I have sometimes wondered, in rational 
moods, why it is that Newport is so much appreci- 
ated by the votaries of idleness and pleasure. Its 
resources are few in number. It is extremely 
circumscribed. It has few drives, few walks, little 
variety of scenery. Its charms and its interest are 
confined to a narrow circle. It has of course the 
unlimited ocean, but seafaring idlers are not true 
Newporters, for any other sea would suit them as 
well. Last evening, it seemed to me, as I drove 
along the Avenue, that I guessed the answer to the 
riddle. The atmospheric tone, the careful selection 
of ingredients, your pleasant sense of a certain 
climatic ripeness — these are the real charm of 
Newport, and the secret of her supremacy. You 
are affected by the admirable art of the landscape, 
by seeing so much that is lovely and impressive 
achieved with such a frugality of means — with so 



340 POETKAITS OF PLACES. [xviil 

little parade of the vast, the various, or the rare, 
with so narrow a range of colour and form. I could 
not help thinking, as I turned from the harmonies 
and purities which lay deepening on the breast 
of nature, with the various shades of twilight, to 
the heterogeneous procession in the Avenue, that, 
quite in their own line of effect, the usual performers 
in this exhibition might learn a few good lessons 
from the daily prospect of the great western expanse 
of rock and ocean in its relations with the declining 
sun. But this is asking too much. Many persons 
of course come to Newport simply because others 
come, and in this way the present brilliant colony 
has grown up. Let me not be suspected, when I 
speak of Newport, of the untasteful heresy of mean- 
ing primarily rocks and waves rather than ladies and 
gentlemen. 

The ladies and gentlemen are in great force — 
the ladies, of course, especially. It is true every- 
where, I suppose, that women are the animating 
element of " society ;" but you feel this to be especi- 
ally true as you pass along Bellevue Avenue. I 
doubt whether anywhere else so many women have 
a " good time " with so small a sacrifice of the 
luxury of self-respect. I heard a lady yesterday tell 
another, with a quiet ecstasy of tone, that she had 
been having a " most perfect time." This is the 
very poetry of pleasure. It is a part of our com- 
placent tradition that in those foreign lands where 
women are supposed to be socially supreme, they 
maintain their empire by various clandestine and 
reprehensible arts. With us — we say it at New- 
port without bravado — they are both conspicuous 



xviii.] NEWPORT. 341 

and unsophisticated. You feel this most gratefully 
as you receive a confident bow from a pretty girl 
in her basket-phaeton. She is very young and very 
pretty, but she has a certain habitual assurance which 
is only a grace the more. She combines, you reflect 
with respectful tenderness, all that is possible in the 
way of modesty with all that is delightful in the 
way of facility. Shyness is certainly very pretty — 
when it is not very ugly ; but shyness may often 
darken the bloom of genuine modesty, and a cer- 
tain frankness and confidence may often incline 
it toward the light. Let us assume, then, that 
all the young ladies whom you may meet here are 
of the highest modern type. In the course of time 
they ripen into the delightful matrons who divide 
your admiration. It is easy to see that Newport 
must be a most agreeable sojourn for the male sex. 
The gentlemen, indeed, look wonderfully prosperous 
and well -conditioned. They gallop on shining 
horses or recline in a sort of coaxing Herculean 
submission beside the lovely mistress of a curricle. 
Young men — and young old men — I have occasion 
to observe, are far more numerous than at Saratoga, 
and of vastly superior quality. There is, indeed, 
in all things a striking difference in tone and aspect 
between these two great centres of pleasure. After 
Saratoga, Newport seems really substantial and 
civilised. iEsthetically speaking, you may remain 
at Newport with a fairly good conscience; at 
Saratoga you linger under passionate protest. At 
Newport life is public, if you will ; at Saratoga it 
is absolutely common. The difference, in a word, 
is the difference between a group of undiscriminating 



342 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xvni. 

hotels and a series of organised homes. Saratoga 
perhaps deserves our greater homage, as being 
characteristically democratic and American ; let us, 
then, make Saratoga the heaven of our aspiration, 
but let us yet a while content ourselves with New- 
port as the lowly earth of our residence. 

The villas and " cottages," the beautiful idle 
women, the beautiful idle men, the brilliant pleasure- 
fraught days and evenings, impart, perhaps, to New- 
port life a faintly European expression, in so far as 
they suggest the somewhat alien presence of leisure 
— "fine old Leisure," as George Eliot calls it. 
Nothing, it seems to me, however, can take place in 
America without straightway seeming very American; 
and, after a week at Newport, you begin to fancy 
that to live for amusement simply, beyond the noise 
of commerce or of care, is a distinctively national 
trait. Nowhere else in this country — nowhere, of 
course, within the range of our better civilisation — 
does business seem so remote, so vague, and unreal. 
It is the only place in America in which enjoyment 
is organised. If there be any poetry in the ignor- 
ance of trade and turmoil and the hard processes of 
fortune, Newport may claim her share of it. She 
knows — or at least appears to know — for the most 
part nothing but results. Individuals here, of 
course, have private cares and burdens to preserve 
the balance and the dignity of life ; but collective 
society conspires to forget everything that worries. 
It is a singular fact that a society that does nothing 
is decidedly more pictorial, more interesting to the 
eye of contemplation, than a society which is hard 
at work. Newport, in this way, is infinitely more 



xviii.] NEWPOET. 343 

fertile in combinations than Saratoga. There you 
feel that idleness is occasional, empirical. Most 
of the people you see are asking themselves, you 
imagine, whether the game is worth the candle and 
work is not better than such difficult play. But 
here, obviously, the habit of pleasure is formed, and 
(within the limits of a severe morality) many of the 
secrets of pleasure are known. Do what we will, 
on certain lines Europe is in advance of us yet. 
Newport lags altogether behind Trouville and 
Brighton in her exhibition of the unmentionable. 
All this is markedly absent from the picture, which 
is therefore signally destitute of the enhancing 
tints produced by the mysteries and fascinations 
of vice. But idleness per se is vicious, and of course 
you may imagine what you please. Eor my own 
part, I prefer to imagine nothing but the graceful 
and the pure ; and with the help of such imagin- 
ings you may construct a very pretty sentimental 
undercurrent to the superficial movement of society. 
This I lately found very difficult to do at Saratoga. 
Sentiment there is pitifully shy and elusive. Here, 
the multiplied relations of men and women, under 
the permanent pressure of luxury and idleness, give 
it a very fair chance. Sentiment, indeed, of masterly 
force and interest, springs up in every soil, with a 
sovereign disregard of occasion. People love and 
hate and aspire with the greatest intensity when 
they have to make their time and opportunity. I 
should hardly come to Newport tor the materials of 
a tragedy. Even in their own kind, the social 
elements are as yet too light and thin. But I can 
fancy finding here the motive of a drama which 



344 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [xvnr. 

should depend more on . smiles than tears. I can 
almost imagine, indeed, a transient observer of the 
Newport spectacle dreaming momentarily of a great 
American novel, in which the heroine might be 
infinitely realistic and yet neither a schoolmistress 
nor an outcast. I say intentionally the " transient " 
observer, because it is probable that here the sus- 
picion only is friendly to dramatic point; the 
knowledge is hostile. The observer would discover, 
on a nearer view, I rather fear, that his possible 
heroines have too perfect a time. 

This will remind the reader of what he must 
already have heard affirmed, that to speak of a 
place with abundance you must know it, but not 
too well. I suffer from knowing the natural ele- 
ments of Newport too well to attempt to describe 
them. I have known them so long that I hardly 
know what I think of them. I have little more 
than a simple consciousness of enjoying them very 
much. Even this consciousness at times lies dumb 
and inert. I wonder at such times whether, to 
appeal fairly to the general human sense, the horizon 
has not too much of that mocking straightness 
which is such a misrepresentation of the real 
character of the sea — as if, forsooth, it were level. 
Life seems too short, space too narrow, to warrant 
you in giving in an unqualified adhesion to a, pay sage, 
which is two -thirds ocean. For the most part, 
however, I am willing to take the landscape as it 
stands, and to think that, without the water to 
make it precious, the land would be much less 
lovable. It is, in fact, a land exquisitely modified 
by marine influences. Indeed, in spite of all the 



xviii.] NEWPORT. 345 

evil it has done me, I could almost speak well of 
the ocean when I remember the charming tricks it 
plays with the Newport promontories. 

The place consists, as the reader will know, of 
an ancient and honourable town, a goodly harbour, 
and a long, broad neck of land, stretching southward 
into the sea and forming the chief habitation of the 
summer colony. Along the greater part of its east- 
ward length, this projecting coast is bordered with 
cliffs of no great height, and dotted with seaward- 
gazing villas. At the head of the promontory the 
villas enjoy a magnificent reach of prospect. The 
pure Atlantic — the old world westward tides — 
expire directly at their feet. Behind the line of 
villas runs the Avenue, with more villas yet — of 
which there is nothing at all to say but that those 
built recently are a hundred times prettier than 
those built fifteen years ago, and give one some hope 
of a revival of the architectural art. Some years 
ago, when I first knew Newport, the town proper 
was considered remarkably quaint. If an antique 
shabbiness that amounts almost to squalor is a 
pertinent element, as I believe it is, of this cele- 
brated quality, the little main street at least — 
Thames Street by name — still deserves the praise. 
Here, in their crooked and dwarfish wooden man- 
sions, are the shops that minister to the daily needs 
of the expanded city ; and here of a summer morn- 
ing, jolting over the cobble stones of the narrow 
roadway, you may see a hundred superfine ladies 
seeking with languid eagerness what they may buy 
— to " buy something," I believe, being a diurnal 
necessity of the conscientious American woman. 



346 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xvin. 

This busy region gradually melts away into the 
grass-grown stillness of the Point, in the eyes of 
many persons the pleasantest quarter of Newport. 
It has superficially the advantage of being as yet 
uninvaded by fashion. When I first knew it, how- 
ever, its peculiar charm was even more undisturbed 
than at present. The Point may be called the old 
residential, as distinguished from the commercial, 
town. It is meagre, shallow and scanty — a mere 
pinch of antiquity — but, so far as it goes, it retains 
an exquisite tone. It leaves the shops and the little 
wharves, and wanders close to the harbour, where 
the breeze -borne rattle of shifted sails and spars 
alone intrudes upon its stillness, till its mouldy- 
timbered quiet subsides into the low, tame rocks 
and beaches which edge the bay. Several matter- 
of-course modern houses have recently been erected 
on the water-side, absorbing the sober, primitive 
tenements which used to maintain the picturesque 
character of the place. They improve it, of course, 
as a residence, but they injure it as an unexpected 
corner. Enough of early architecture still remains, 
however, to suggest a multitude of thoughts as to 
the severe simplicity of the generation which pro- 
duced it. The plain gray nudity of these little 
warped and shingled boxes seems to make it a 
hopeless task on their part to present any positive 
appearance at all. But here, as elsewhere, the 
magical Newport atmosphere wins half the battle. 
It aims at no mystery — it simply makes them scin- 
tillate in their bareness. Their homely notches 
and splinters twinkle till the mere friendliness of 
the thing makes a surface. Their steep gray roofs, 



XVlii.] NEWPOET. 347 

barnacled with lichens, remind you of old barges, 
overturned on the beach to dry. 

One of the more recent monuments of fashion 
is the long drive which follows the shore. The 
Avenue, where the Neck abruptly terminates, has 
been made to extend itself to the west, and to 
wander for a couple of miles over a lovely region of 
beach and lowly down and sandy meadow and salt 
brown sheep-grass. This region was formerly the 
most beautiful part of Newport — the least frequented 
and the most untamed by fashion. I by no means 
regret the creation of the new road, however. A 
walker may very soon isolate himself, and the occu- 
pants of carriages are exposed to a benefit quite 
superior to their power of injury. The peculiar 
charm of this great westward expanse is very difficult 
to define. It is in an especial degree the charm of 
Newport in general — the combined lowness of tone, 
as painters call it, in all the elements of terra firma, 
and the extraordinary elevation of tone in the air. 
For miles and miles you see at your feet, in mingled 
shades of yellow and gray, a desolate waste of moss- 
clad rock and sand-starved grass. At your left is 
nothing but the shine and surge of the ocean, and 
over your head that wonderful sky of Newport, which 
has such an unexpected resemblance to the sky of 
Venice. In spite of the bare simplicity of this pro- 
spect, its beauty is far more a beauty of detail than 
that of the average American landscape. Descend 
into a hollow of the rocks, into one of the little warm 
climates, five feet square, which you may find there, 
beside the grateful ocean glare, and you will be 
struck quite as much by their fineness as by their 



348 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xviu. 

roughness. From time to time, as you wander, you 
will meet a lonely, stunted tree, which is sure to be 
a charming piece of the individual grotesque. The 
region of which I speak is perhaps best seen in the 
late afternoon, from the high seat of a carriage on the 
Avenue. You seem to stand just outside the thres- 
hold of the west. At its opposite extremity sinks 
the sun, with such a splendour, perhaps, as I lately 
saw — a splendour of the deepest blue, more lumin- 
ous and fiery than the usual redness of evening, and 
all streaked and barred with blown and drifted gold. 
The whole large interval, with its rocks and marshes 
and ponds, seems bedimmed with a kind of purple 
glaze. The near Atlantic fades and turns cold with 
that desolate look of the ocean when the day ceases 
to care for it. In the foreground, a short distance 
from the road, an old orchard uplifts its tangled 
stems and branches against the violet mists of the 
west. It seems strangely grotesque and enchanted. 
No ancient olive-grove of Italy or Provence was ever 
more hoarily romantic. This is what people com- 
monly behold on the last homeward bend of the 
drive. For such of them as are happy enough to 
occupy one of the villas on the cliffs, the beauty of 
the day has even yet not expired. The present 
summer has been emphatically the summer of moon- 
lights. Not the nights, however, but the long days, 
in these agreeable homes, are what especially appeal 
to my fancy. Here you find a solution of the in- 
soluble problem — to combine an abundance of society 
with an abundance of solitude. In their charming 
broad-windowed drawing-rooms, on their great sea- 
ward piazzas, within sight of the serious Atlantic 



xvni.] NEWPORT. 349 

horizon, which is so familiar to the eye and so 
mysterious to the heart, caressed by the gentle 
breeze which makes all but simple, social, delightful 
now and here seem unreal and untasteful — the 
sweet fruit of the lotus grows more than ever succu- 
lent and" magical. How sensible they ought to be, 
the denizens of these pleasant places, of their peculiar 
felicity and distinction ! How it should purify their 
temper and refine their tastes ! How delicate, how 
wise, how discriminating they should become ! 
What excellent manners — what enlightened opinions 
— their situation should produce ! How it should 
purge them of vulgarity ! Happy villeggianti of 
Newport ! 



XIX. 

QUEBEC. 

1871. 

I. 

A traveller who combines a taste for old towns 
with a love of letters ought not, I suppose, to pass 
through "the most picturesque city in America" 
without making an attempt to commemorate his 
impressions. His first impression will certainly 
have been that not America, but Europe, should 
have the credit of Quebec. I came, some days 
since, by a dreary night -journey, to Point Levi, 
opposite the town, and as we rattled toward our goal 
in the faint raw dawn, and, already attentive to 
" effects," I began to consult the misty window-panes 
and descried through the moving glass little but 
crude, monotonous woods, suggestive of nothing that 
I had ever heard of in song or story, I felt that the 
land would have much to do to give itself a romantic 
air. And, in fact, the feat is achieved with almost 
magical suddenness. The old world rises in the 
midst of the new in the manner of a change of scene 
on the stage. The St. Lawrence shines at your left, 1 
large as a harbour -mouth, gray with smoke and 



XIX.] QUEBEC. 351 

masts, and edged on its hither verge by a bustling 
water-side faubourg which looks French or English, 
or anything not local that you please ; and beyond 
it, over against you, on its rocky promontory, sits 
the ancient town, belted with its hoary wall and 
crowned- with its granite citadel. Now that I have 
been here a while I find myself wondering how the 
city would strike one if the imagination had not 
been bribed beforehand. The place, after all, is of 
the soil on which it stands ; yet it appeals to you so 
cunningly with its little stock of transatlantic wares 
that you overlook its flaws and lapses, and swallow 
it whole. Fancy lent a willing hand the morning I 
arrived, and zealously retouched the picture. The 
very sky seemed to have been brushed in like the 
sky in an English water-colour, the light to filter 
down through an atmosphere more dense and more 
conscious. You cross a ferry, disembark at the foot 
of the rock on unmistakably foreign soil, and then 
begin to climb into the city proper — the city intra 
muros. These walls, to the American vision, are of 
course the sovereign fact of Quebec ; you take off 
your hat to them as you clatter through the 
gate. They are neither very high nor, after all, 
very hoary. Our clear American air is hostile to 
those mellow deposits and incrustations which enrich 
the venerable surfaces of Europe. Still, they are 
walls ; till but a short time ago they quite encircled 
the town ; they are garnished with little slits 
for musketry and big embrasures for cannon ; they 
offer here and there to the strolling bourgeoisie a 
stretch of grassy rampart ; and they make the whole 
place definite and personal. 



352 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xrx 

Before you reach the gates, however, you will 
have been reminded at a dozen points that you have 
come abroad. What is the essential difference of 
tone between street -life in an old civilisation and 
in a new ? It seems something subtler and deeper 
than mere external accidents — than foreign archi- 
tecture, than foreign pinks, greens, and yellows 
plastering the house -fronts, than the names of the 
saints on the corners, than all the pleasant crooked- 
ness, narrowness and duskiness, the quaint econo- 
mised spaces, the multifarious detail, the brown 
French faces, the ruddy English ones. It seems to 
be the general fact of detail itself — the hint in the 
air of a slow, accidental accretion, in obedience to 
needs more timidly considered and more sparingly 
gratified than the pressing necessities of American 
progress. But apart from the metaphysics of the 
question, Quebec has a great many pleasant little 
ripe spots and amenities. You note the small, box- 
like houses in rugged stone or in stucco, each painted 
with uncompromising naivete" in some bright hue of 
the owner's fond choice ; you note with joy, with 
envy, with momentary self-effacement, as a New 
Yorker, as a Bostonian, the innumerable calashes 
and cabs which contend for your selection ; and you 
observe when you arrive at the hotel, that this is a 
blank and gloomy inn, of true provincial aspect, with 
slender promise of the " American plan." Perhaps, 
even the clerk at the office will have the courtesy of 
the ages of leisure. I confess that, in my case, he 
was terribly modern, so that I was compelled to 
resort for a lodging to a private house near by, where 
I enjoy a transitory glimpse of the vie intime of 



XIX.] QUEBEC. 353 

Quebec. I fancied, when I came in, that it would 
he a compensation for worse quarters to possess the 
little Canadian vignette I enjoy from my windows. 
Certain shabby Yankee sheds, indeed, encumber the 
foreground, but they are so near that I can overlook 
them. Beyond is a piece of garden, attached to 
nothing less than a convent of the cloistered nuns 
of St. Ursula. The convent chapel rises inside it, 
crowned with what seemed to me, in view of the 
circumstances, a real little clocher de France. The 
" circumstances," I confess, are simply a couple of 
stout French poplars. I call them French because 
they are alive and happy ; whereas, if they had been 
American they would have died of a want of apprecia- 
tion, like their brothers in the " States." I do not 
say that the little convent-belfry, roofed and coated 
as it is with quaint scales of tin, would, by itself, 
produce any very deep illusion ; or that the whisper- 
ing poplars, per se, would transport me to the Gallic 
mother-land ; but poplars and belfry together consti- 
tute an " effect " — strike a musical note in the scale 
of association. I look fondly even at the little case- 
ments which command this prospect, for they too 
are an old-world heritage. They open sidewise, in 
two wings, and are screwed together by that bother- 
some little iron handle over which we have fumbled 
so often in European inns. 

If the windows tell of French dominion, of course 
larger matters testify with greater eloquence. In a 
place so small as Quebec, the bloom of novelty of 
course rubs off; but when first I walked abroad I 
fancied myself again in a French seaside town 
where I once spent a year, in common with a large 
2 A 



354 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xix. 

number of economically disposed English. The 
French element offers the groundwork, and the English 
colony wears, for the most part, that half-genteel 
and migratory air which stamps the exiled and pro- 
vincial British. They look as if they were still en 
voyage — still in search of low prices — the men in 
woollen shirts and Scotch bonnets ; the ladies with 
a certain look of being equipped for dangers and 
difficulties. Your very first steps will be likely 
to lead you to the market-place, which is a genuine 
bit of Europeanism. One side of it is occupied by 
a huge edifice of yellow plaster, with stone facings 
painted in blue, and a manner of porte-coche're, lead- 
ing into a veritable court — originally, I believe, a 
college of the early Jesuits, now a place of military 
stores. On the other stands the French cathedral, 
with an ample stone facade, a bulky stone tower, 
and a high-piled, tin-scaled belfry ; not architectural, 
of course, nor imposing, but with a certain gray 
maturity, and, as regards the belfry, a quite adequate 
quaintness. Bound about are shops and houses, 
touching which, I think, it is no mere fancy that they 
might, as they stand, look down into some dull and 
rather dirty place in France. The stalls and booths 
in the centre — tended by genuine peasants of 
tradition, brown-faced old Frenchwomen, with hard 
wrinkles and short petticoats, and white caps beneath 
their broad-brimmed hats, and more than one price, as 
I think you'll find — these, and the stationed caleches 
and cabriolets complete a passably fashionable French 
picture. It is a proof of how nearly the old market- 
women resemble their originals across the sea that 
you rather resentfully miss one or two of the proper 



XIX.] QUEBEC. 355 

ieatures of the type — the sabots for the feet and the 
donkey for the load. Of course you go into the 
cathedral, and how forcibly that swing of the door, 
as you doff your hat in the cooler air, recalls the old 
tourist strayings and pryings beneath other skies ! 
You find a big garish church, with a cold high light, 
a promiscuity of stucco and gilding, and a mild 
odour of the seventeenth century. It is, perhaps, a 
shade or so more sensibly Catholic than it would be 
with ourselves ; but, in fine, it has pews and a 
boarded floor, and the few paintings are rather pale 
in their badness, and you are forced to admit that 
the old-world tone which sustains itself so comfort- 
ably elsewhere falters most where most is asked 
of it. 

Among the other lions of Quebec — notably in 
the Citadel — you find Protestant England supreme. 
A robust trooper of her Majesty, with a pair of very 
tight trousers and a very small cap, takes charge of 
you at the entrance of the fortifications, and con- 
ducts you through all kinds of incomprehensible 
defences. I cannot speak of the place as an engineer, 
but only as a tourist, and the tourist is chiefly con- 
cerned with the view. This is altogether superb, 
and if Quebec is not the most picturesque city in 
America, this is no fault of its incomparable site. 
Perched on its mountain of rock, washed by a river 
as free and ample as an ocean-gulf, sweeping from 
its embattled crest, the villages, the forests, the blue 
undulations of the imperial province of which it is 
warden— as it has managed from our scanty annals 
to squeeze out a past, you pray in the name of all 
that's majestic that it may have a future. I may 



356 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xix. 

add that, to the mind of the reflective visitor, these 
idle ramparts and silent courts present other visions 
than that of the mighty course of the river and its 
anchorage for navies. They evoke a shadowy image 
of that great English power, the arches of whose 
empire were once built strong on foreign soil ; and 
as you stand where they are highest and look abroad 
upon a land of alien speech, you seem to hear the 
echoed names of other strongholds and provinces — 
Gibraltar, Malta, India. Whether these arches are 
crumbling now, I do not pretend to say; but the 
last regular troops (in number lately much dimin- 
ished) are just about to be withdrawn from Quebec, 
and in the private circles to which I have been 
admitted I hear sad forebodings of what society will 
lose by the departure of the " military." This single 
word is eloquent ; it reveals a social order distinctly 
affiliated, in spite of remoteness, to the society re- 
produced for the pacific American in novels in which 
the hero is a captain of the army or navy, and of 
which the scene is therefore necessarily laid in 
countries provided with these branches of the public 
service. Another opportunity for some such re- 
flections, worthy of a historian or an essayist, as 
those I have hinted at, is afforded you on the Plains 
of Abraham, to which you probably adjourn directly 
from the Citadel — another, but I am bound to say, 
in my opinion, a less inspiring one. A battlefield 
remains a battlefield, whatever may be done to it ; 
but the scene of Wolfe's victory has been profaned 
by the erection of a vulgar prison, and this memento 
of human infirmities does much to efface the meagre 
column which, with its neat inscription, "Here died 



XIX.] QUEBEC. 357 

"Wolfe, victorious," stands there as a symbol of ex- 
ceptional virtue. 

II. 

To express the historical interest of the place 
completely, I should dwell on the light provincial — 
Trench provincial — aspect of some of the little 
residential streets. Some of the houses have the 
staleness of complexion which Balzac loved to 
describe. They are chiefly built of stone or brick, 
with a stoutness and separateness of structure which 
stands in some degree in stead of architecture. I 
know not that, externally, they have any greater 
charm than that they belong to that category of 
dwellings which in our own cities were long since 
pulled down to make room for brown-stone fronts. 
I know not, indeed, that I can express better the 
picturesque merit of Quebec than by saying that it 
has no fronts of this luxurious and horrible sub- 
stance. The greater number of houses are built of 
rough-hewn squares of some more vulgar mineral, 
painted with frank chocolate or buff, and adorned 
with blinds of a cruder green than we admire. As 
you pass the low windows of these abodes, you per- 
ceive the walls to be of extraordinary thickness ; the 
embrasure is of great depth ; Quebec was built for 
winter. Door-plates are frequent, and you observe 
that the tenants are of the Gallic persuasion. Here 
and there, before a door, stands a comely private 
equipage — a fact agreeably suggestive of a low scale 
of prices ; for evidently in Quebec one need not be 
a millionaire to keep a carriage, and one may make 
a figure on moderate means. The great number of 



358 POKTKAITS OF PLACES. [xix. 

private carriages visible in the streets is another 
item, by the way, among the Europeanisms of the 
place ; and not, as I may say, as regards the simple 
fact that they exist, but as regards the fact that 
they are considered needful for women, for young 
persons, for gentility. What does it do with itself, 
this gentility, keeping a gig or not, you wonder, as 
you stroll past its little multicoloured mansions. 
You strive almost vainly to picture the life of this 
French society, locked up in its small dead capital, 
isolated on a heedless continent, and gradually con- 
suming its principal, as one may say — its vital 
stock of memories, traditions, superstitions. Its 
evenings must be as dull as the evenings described 
by Balzac in his Vie de Province; but has it the 
same ways and means of dulness ? Does it play 
loto and "boston" in the long winter nights, and 
arrange marriages between its sons and daughters, 
whose education it has confided to abb^s and 
abbesses ? I have met in the streets here little old 
Frenchmen who look as if they had stepped out of 
Balzac — bristling with the habits of a class, wrinkled 
with old-world expressions. Something assures one 
that Quebec must be a city of gossip ; for evidently 
it is not a city of culture. A glance at the few 
booksellers' windows gives evidence of this. A few 
Catholic statuettes and prints, two or three Catholic 
publications, a festoon or so of rosaries, a volume of 
Lamartine, a supply of ink and matches, form the 
principal stock. 

In the lower class of the French population there 
is a much livelier vitality. They are a genuine 
peasantry ; you very soon observe it, as you drive 



xix.] QUEBEC. 359 

along the pleasant country-roads. Just what it is 
that makes a peasantry, it is, perhaps, not easy to 
determine ; "but whatever it is, these good people 
have it — in their simple, unsharpened faces, in their 
narrow patois, in their ignorance and naivete', and 
their evident good terms with the tin-spired parish 
church, standing there as bright and clean with 
ungrudged paint and varnish as a Niirnberg toy, 
One of them spoke to me with righteous contempt 
of the French of France — " They are worth nothing ; 
they are bad Catholics." These are good Catholics, 
and I doubt whether anywhere Catholicism wears a 
brighter face and maintains more docility at the 
cost of less misery. It is, perhaps, not Longfellow's 
Evangeline for chapter and verse, but it is a tolerable 
prose transcript. There is no visible squalor, there 
are no rags and no curses, but there is a most 
agreeable tinge of gentleness, thrift, and piety. I 
am assured that the country -people are in the last 
degree mild and peaceable ; surely, such neatness 
and thrift, without the irritability of the French 
genius — it is true the genius too is absent — is a 
very pleasant type of character. Without being 
ready to proclaim, with an enthusiastic friend, that 
the roadside scenery is more French than France, I 
may say that, in its way, it is quite as picturesque 
as anything within the city. There is an air of 
completeness and maturity in the landscape which 
suggests an old country. The roads, to begin with, 
are decidedly better than our own, and the cottages 
and farmhouses would need only a bit of thatch and 
a few red tiles here and there to enable them to 
figure creditably by the waysides of Normandy or 



360 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xix. 

Brittany. The road to Montmorency, on which 
tourists most congregate, is also, I think, the prettiest. 
The rows of poplars, the heavy stone cottages, seamed 
and cracked with time, in many cases, and daubed 
in coarse, bright hues, the little bourgeois villas, 
rising middle-aged at the end of short vistas, the 
sunburnt women in the fields, the old men in 
woollen stockings and red nightcaps, the long- 
kirtled cure" nodding to doffed hats, the more or less 
bovine stare which greets you from cottage -doors, 
are all so many touches of a local colour reflected 
from over the sea. What especially strikes one, 
however, is the peculiar tone of the light and the 
atmospheric effects — the chilly whites and grays, 
the steely reflections, the melancholy brightness of a 
frigid zone. Winter here gives a stamp to the year, 
and seems to leave even through spring and summer 
a kind of scintillating trail of his presence. To me, 
I confess it is terrible, and I fancy I see constantly 
in the brilliant sky the hoary genius of the climate 
brooding grimly over his dominion. 

The falls of Montmorency, which you reach by 
the pleasant avenue I speak of, are great, I believe, 
among the falls of the earth. They are certainly 
very fine, even in the attenuated shape to which 
they are reduced at the present season. I doubt 
whether you obtain anywhere in simpler and more 
powerful form the very essence of a cataract — 
the wild, fierce, suicidal plunge of a living, sound- 
ing flood. A little platform, lodged in the cliff, 
enables you to contemplate it with almost shameful 
convenience ; here you may stand at your leisure 
and spin analogies, more or less striking, on the very 



Xix.] QUEBEC. 361 

edge of the white abyss. The leap of the water 
begins directly at your feet, and your eye trifles 
dizzily with the long, perpendicular shaft of foam, 
and tries, in the eternal crash, to effect some vague 
notation of its successive stages of sound and fury ; 
but the vaporous sheet, for ever dropping, lapses 
from beneath the eye, and leaves the vision dis- 
tracted in mid-space ; and the vision, in search of 
a resting-place, sinks in a flurry to the infamous 
saw-mill which defaces the very base of the torrent. 
The falls of Montmorency are obviously one of 
the greatest of the beauties of nature ; but I hope 
it is not beside the mark to say that of all 
the beauties of nature, "falls" are to me the 
least satisfying. A mountain, a precipice, a river, 
a forest, a plain, I can enjoy at my ease; they 
are natural, normal, self-assured; they make no 
appeal ; they imply no human admiration, no petty 
human cranings and shrinkings, head -swimmings 
and similes. A cataract, of course, is essentially 
violent. You are certain, moreover, to have to 
approach it through a turnstile, and to enjoy it from 
some terribly cockneyfied little booth. The spectacle 
at Montmorency appears to be the private property 
of a negro innkeeper, who " runs " it evidently with 
great pecuniary profit. A day or two since I went 
so far as to be glad to leave it behind, and drive 
some five miles farther along the road, to a village 
rejoicing in the pretty name of Chateau -Richer. 
The village is so pretty that you count on finding 
there the elderly manor w T hich might have baptized 
it. But, of course, in such pictorial efforts as this 
Quebec breaks down ; one must not ask too much 



362 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xix. 

of it. You enjoy from here, however, a revelation 
of the noble position of the city. The river, finding 
room in mid-stream for the long island of Orleans, 
opens out below you with a peculiar freedom and 
serenity, and leads the eye far down to where an 
azure mountain gazes up the channel and responds 
to the dark headland of Quebec. I noted, here and 
there, as I went, an extremely sketckable effect. 
Between the road and the river stand a succession 
of ancient peasant -dwellings, with their back- 
winclows looking toward the stream. Glancing, as 
I passed, into the apertures that face the road, I saw, 
as through a picture -frame, their dark, rich -toned 
interiors, played into by the late river light and 
making an admirable series of mellow tableaux de 
genre. The little curtained alcoves, the big house- 
hold beds, and presses, and dressers, the black - 
mouthed chimney-pieces, the crucifixes, the old 
women at their spinning-wheels, the little heads at 
the supper -table, around the big French loaf, out- 
lined with a rim of light, were all as warmly, as 
richly composed, as French, as Dutch, as worthy of 
the brush, as anything in the countries to which 
artists resort for subjects. 

I suppose no patriotic American can look at all 
these things, however idly, without reflecting on the 
ultimate possibility of their becoming absorbed into 
his own huge state. Whenever, sooner or later, the 
change is wrought, the sentimental tourist will 
keenly feel that a long stride has been taken, rough- 
shod, from the past to the present. The largest 
appetite in modern civilisation will have swallowed 
the largest morseL What the change may bring of 



XIX.] QUEBEC. 363 

comfort or of grief to the Canadians themselves, will 
be for them to say ; but, in the breast of this senti- 
mental tourist of ours, it will produce little but 
regret. The foreign elements of eastern Canada, at 
least, are extremely interesting; and it is of good 
profit to us Americans to have near us, and of easy 
access, an ample something which is not our ex- 
pansive selves. Here we find a hundred mementoes 
of an older civilisation than our own, of different 
manners, of social forces once mighty, and still 
glowing with a sort of autumnal warmth. The old- 
world needs which created the dark-walled cities of 
Trance and Italy seem to reverberate faintly in the 
steep and narrow and Catholic streets of Quebec. 
The little houses speak to the fancy by rather inex- 
pensive arts ; the ramparts are endued with a sort 
of silvery innocence; but the historic sense, conscious 
of a general solidarity in the picturesque, ekes out 
the romance and deepens the colouring. 



XX. 

NIAGARA. 

1871. 

My journey hitherward by a morning's sail from 
Toronto across Lake Ontario, seemed to me, as 
regards a certain dull vacuity in this episode of 
travel, a kind of calculated preparation for the up- 
roar of Niagara — a pause or hush on the threshold 
of a great impression : and this, too, in spite of the 
reverent attention I was mindful to bestow on the 
first seen, in my experience, of the great lakes. It 
has the merit, from the shore, of producing a slight 
ambiguity of vision. It is the sea, and yet just not 
the sea. The huge expanse, the landless line of 
the horizon, suggest the ocean ; while an indefinable 
shortness of pulse, a kind of fresh- water gentleness 
of tone, seem to contradict the idea. What meets 
the eye is on the scale of the ocean, but you feel 
somehow that the lake is a thing of smaller spirit. 
Lake-navigation, therefore, seems to me not especially 
entertaining. The scene tends to offer, as one may 
say, a sort of marine - effect missed. It has the 
blankness and vacancy of the sea, without that vast 
essential swell which, amid the belting brine, so 



xx.] NIAGARA. 365 

often saves the situation to the eye. I was occupied, 
as we crossed, in wondering whether this dull re- 
duction of the main contained that which could 
properly be termed " scenery." At the mouth of the 
Niagara Eiver, however, after a sail of three hours, 
scenery • really begins, and very soon crowds upon 
you in force. The steamer puts into the narrow 
channel of the stream, and heads upward between 
high embankments. From this point, I think, you 
really enter into relations with Niagara. Little by 
little the elements become a picture, rich with the 
shadow of coming events. You have a foretaste of 
the great spectacle of colour which you enjoy at the 
Falls. The even cliffs of red -brown earth are 
crusted and spotted with autumnal orange and 
crimson, and, laden with this gorgeous decay, they 
plunge sheer into the deep-dyed green of the river. 
As you proceed, the river begins to tell its tale — at 
first in broken syllables of foam and flurry, and then, 
as it were, in rushing, flashing sentences and pas- 
sionate ejaculations. Onwards from Lewiston, where 
you are transferred from the boat to the train, you 
see it from the edge of the American cliff, far be- 
neath you, now superbly unnavigable. You have a 
lively sense of something happening ahead ; the 
river, as a man near me said, has evidently been in 
a row. The cliffs here are immense ; they form a 
vomitorium worthy of the living floods whose exit 
they protect. This is the first act of the drama of 
Niagara ; for it is, I believe, one of the common- 
places of description that you instinctively convert 
It into a series of " situations." At the station per- 
taining to the railway suspension-bridge, you see fc 



366 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xx. 

niid -air, beyond an interval of murky confusion 
produced at once by the farther bridge, the smoke 
of the trains, and the thickened atmosphere of the 
peopled bank, a huge far-flashing sheet which glares 
through the distance as a monstrous absorbent and 
irradiant of light. And here, in the interest of the 
picturesque, let me note that this obstructive bridge 
tends in a way to enhance the first glimpse of the 
cataract. Its long black span, falling dead along 
the shining brow of the Falls, seems shivered and 
smitten by their fierce effulgence, and trembles across 
the field of vision like some enormous mote in a 
light too brilliant. A moment later, as the train 
proceeds, you plunge into the village, and the 
cataract, save as a vague ground-tone to this trivial 
interlude, is, like so many other goals of aesthetic 
pilgrimage, temporarily postponed to the hotel. 

With this postponement comes, I think, an im- 
mediate decline of expectation ; for there is every 
appearance that the spectacle you have come so far 
to see is to be choked in the horribly vulgar shops 
and booths and catchpenny artifices which have 
pushed and elbowed to within the very spray of the 
Falls, and ply their importunities in shrill competi- 
tion with its thunder. You see a multitude of hotels 
and taverns and stores, glaring with white paint, 
bedizened with placards and advertisements, and 
decorated by groups of those gentlemen who flourish 
most rankly on the soil of New York and in the 
vicinage of hotels ; who carry their hands in their 
pockets, wear their hats always and every way, and, 
although of a stationary habit, yet spurn the earth 
with their heels. A side -glimpse of the Falls, 



xx.] NIAGARA. 367 

however, calls out your philosophy ; you reflect that 
this may be regarded as one of those sordid fore- 
grounds which Turner liked to use, and which may 
be effective as a foil ; you hurry to where the roar 
grows louder, and, I was going to say, you escape 
from the village. In fact, however, you don't 
escape from it ; it is constantly at your elbow, just 
to the right or the left of the line of contemplation. 
It would be paying Niagara a poor compliment to 
say that, practically, she does not hurl away this 
chaffering by-play from her edge ; but as you value 
the integrity of your impression, you are bound to 
affirm that it suffers appreciable abatement from 
such sources. You wonder, as you stroll about, 
whether it is altogether an unrighteous dream that 
with the slow progress of taste and the possible or 
impossible growth of some larger comprehension, of 
beauty and fitness, the public conscience may not 
tend to confer upon such sovereign phases of nature 
something -of the inviolability and privacy which we 
are slow to bestow, indeed, upon fame, but which 
we do not grudge at least to art. We place a great 
picture, a great statue, in a museum : we erect a 
great monument in the centre of our largest square, 
and if we can suppose ourselves nowadays to build 
a cathedral, we should certainly isolate it as much 
as possible and expose it to no ignoble contact. We 
cannot enclose Niagara with walls and a roof, nor 
girdle it with a palisade ; but the sentimental tourist 
may muse upon the contingency of its being guarded 
by the negative homage of empty spaces and absent 
barracks and decent forbearance. The actual abuse 
of the scene belongs evidently to that immense class 



368 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [XX. 

of iniquities which are destined to grow very much 
worse in order to grow a very little better. The 
good humour engendered by the main spectacle bids 
you suffer it to run its course. 

Though hereabouts so much is great, distances 
are small, and a ramble of two or three hours en- 
ables you to gaze hither and thither from a dozen 
standpoints. The one you are likely to choose first 
is that on the Canada cliff, a little way above the 
suspension-bridge. The great fall faces you, en- 
shrined in its own surging incense. The common 
feeling just here, I believe, is one of disappointment 
at its want of height ; the whole thing appears to 
many people somewhat smaller than its fame. My 
own sense, I confess, was absolutely gratified from 
the first ; and, indeed, I was not struck with any- 
thing being tall or short, but with everything being 
perfect. You are, moreover, at some distance, and 
you feel that with the lessening interval you will 
not be cheated of your chance to be dizzied with 
mere dimensions. Already you see the world- 
famous green, baffling painters, baffling poets shining 
on the lip of the precipice ; the more so, of course, 
for the clouds of silver and snow into which it 
speedily resolves itself. The whole picture before 
you is admirably simple. The Horseshoe glares 
and boils and smokes from the centre to the right, 
drumming itself into powder and thunder; in the 
centre the dark pedestal of Goat Island divides the 
double flood ; to the left booms in vaporous dimness 
the minor battery of the American Fall ; while on 
a level with the eye, above the still crest of either 
cataract, appear the white faces of the hithermost 



xx.] - NIAGARA. 369 

rapids. The circle of weltering froth at the base of 
the Horseshoe, emerging from the dead white vapours 
— absolute white, as moonless midnight is absolute 
black — which muffle impenetrably the crash of the 
river upon the lower bed, melts slowly into the darker 
shades "of green. It seems in itself a drama of 
thrilling interest, this blanched survival and recovery 
of the stream. It stretches away like a tired swim- 
mer, struggling from the snowy scum and the silver 
drift, and passing slowly from an eddying foam- 
sheet, touched with green lights, to a cold, verd- 
antique, streaked and marbled with trails and wild 
arabesques of foam. This is the beginning of that 
air of recent distress which marks the river as you 
meet it at the lake. It shifts along, tremendously 
conscious, relieved, disengaged, knowing the worst is 
over, with its dignity injured but its volume un- 
diminished, the most stately, the least turbid of 
torrents. Its movement, its sweep and stride, are 
as admirable as its colour, but as little as its colour 
to be made a matter of words. These things are but 
part of a spectacle in which nothing is imperfect. 
As you draw nearer and nearer, on the Canada cliff, 
to the right arm of the Horseshoe, the mass begins 
in all conscience to be large enough. You are able 
at last to stand on the very verge of the shelf from 
which the leap is taken, bathing your boot-toes, if 
you like, in the side-ooze of the glassy curve. I 
may say, in parenthesis, that the importunities one 
suffers here, amid the central din of the cataract, 
from hackmen and photographers and vendors of 
gimcracks, are simply hideous and infamous. The 
road is lined with little drinking-shops and ware- 
2 B 



370 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xx. 

houses, and from these retreats their occupants dait 
forth upon the hapless traveller with their competi- 
tive attractions. You purchase release at last by the 
fury of your indifference, and stand there gazing 
your fill at the most beautiful object in the world. 

The perfect taste of it is the great characteristic. 
It is not in the least monstrous ; it is thoroughly 
artistic and, as the phrase is, thought out. In the 
matter of line it beats Michael Angelo. One may 
seem at first to say the least, but the careful observer 
will admit that one says the most, in saying that it 
pleases — pleases even a spectator who was not 
ashamed to write the other day that he didn't care for 
cataracts. There are, however, so many more things 
to say about it — its multitudinous features crowd so 
upon the vision as one looks — that it seems absurd to 
begin to analyse. The main feature, perhaps, is the 
incomparable loveliness of the immense line of the 
shelf and its lateral abutments. It neither falters, 
nor breaks nor stiffens, but maintains from wing to 
wing the lightness of its semicircle. This perfect 
curve melts into the sheet that seems at once to 
drop from it and sustain it. The famous green loses 
nothing, as you may imagine, on a nearer view. A 
green more vividly cool and pure it is impossible to 
conceive. It is to the vulgar greens of earth what 
the blue of a summer sky is to artificial dyes, and 
is, in fact, as sacred, as remote, as impalpable as that. 
You can fancy it the parent-green, the head-spring of 
colour to all the verdant water-caves and all the clear, 
sub-fluvial haunts and bowers of naiads and mermen 
in all the streams of the earth. The lower half of 
the watery wall is shrouded in the steam of the boil- 



xx.] NIAGARA. 371 

ing gulf — a veil never rent nor lifted. At its heart 
this eternal cloud seems fixed and still with excess 
of motion — still and intensely white ; but, as it rolls 
and climbs against its lucent cliff, it tosses little 
whiffs and fumes and pants of snowy smoke, which 
betray the convulsions we never behold. In the 
middle of the curve, the depth of the recess, the con- 
verging walls are ground into a dust of foam, which 
rises in a tall column, and fills the upper air with 
its hovering drift. Its summit far overtops the crest 
of the cataract, and, as you look down along the 
rapids above, you see it hanging over the averted 
gulf like some far-flowing signal of danger. Of these 
things some vulgar verbal hint may be attempted ; 
but what words can render the rarest charm of all 
— the clear-cut brow of the Fall, the very act and 
figure of the leap, the rounded passage of the hori- 
zontal to the perpendicular ? To say it is simple 
is to make a phrase about it. Nothing was ever 
more successfully executed. It is carved as sharp 
as an emerald, as one must say and say again. It 
arrives, it pauses, it plunges ; it comes and goes for 
ever; it melts and shifts and changes, all with the 
sound as of millions of bass -voices; and yet its 
outline never varies, never moves with a different 
pulse. It is as gentle as the pouring of wine from 
a flagon — of melody from the lip of a singer. From 
the little grove beside the American Fall you catch 
this extraordinary profile better than you are able to 
do at the Horseshoe. If the line of beauty had 
vanished from the earth elsewhere, it would survive 
on the brow of Niagara. It is impossible to insist 
too strongly on the grace of the thing, as seen from 



372 POETEAITS OF PLACES. [xx. 

the Canada cliff. The genius who invented it was 
certainly the first author of the idea that order, pro- 
portion and symmetry are the conditions of perfect 
beauty. He applied his faith among the watching 
and listening forests, long before the Greeks pro- 
claimed theirs in the measurements of the Parthenon. 
Even the roll of the white batteries at the base seems 
fixed and poised and ordered, and in the vague middle 
zone of difference between the flood as it falls and 
the mist as it rises you imagine a mystical meaning 
— the passage of body to soul, of matter to spirit, of 
human to divine. 

Goat Island, of which every one has heard, is the 
menagerie of lions, and the spot where your single 
stone — or, in plain prose, your half-dollar — kills 
most birds. This broad insular strip, which per- 
forms the excellent office of withholding the 
American shore from immediate contact with the 
flood, has been left very much to itself, and here you 
may ramble, for the most part, in undiverted' con - v 
templation. The island is owned, I believe, by a 
family of co-heirs, who have the good taste to keep 
it quiet. More than once, however, as I have been 
told, they have been offered a " big price " for the 
privilege of building an hotel upon this sacred soil. 
They have been wise, but, after all, they are human, 
and the offer may be made once too often. Before 
this fatal day dawns, why should not the State buy 
up the precious acres, as California has done the 
Yo - Semite ? It is the opinion of a sentimental 
tourist that no price would be too great to pay. 
Otherwise, the only hope for their integrity is in the 
possibility of a shrewd provision on the part of the 



SX.] NIAGARA. 373 

gentlemen who know how to keep hotels that the 
music of the dinner-band would be injured by the 
roar of the cataract. You approach from Goat 
Island the left abutment of the Horseshoe. The 
little tower which, with the classic rainbow, figures 
in all "views " of the scene, is planted at a dozen 
feet from the shore, directly on the shoulder of the 
Fall. This little tower, I think, deserves a compli- 
ment. One might have said beforehand that it 
would never do, but, as it stands, it makes rather a 
good point. It serves as a unit of appreciation of 
the scale of things, and from its spray -blackened 
summit it admits you to an almost downward peep 
into the green gulf. More here, even, than on the 
Canada shore, you perceive the unlimited wateriness 
of the whole spectacle. Its liquid masses take on 
at moments the likeness of walls and pillars and 
columns, and, to present any vivid picture of them, 
we are compelled to talk freely of emerald and crys- 
tal, of silver and marble. But really, all the sim- 
plicity of the Falls, and half their grandeur, reside 
in their unmitigated fluidity, which excludes all 
rocky staging and earthy commixture. It is water 
piled on water, pinned on water, hinging and hang- 
ing on water, breaking, crashing, whitening in shocks 
altogether watery. And yet for all this no solid 
was ever so solid as that sculptured shoulder of the 
Horseshoe. From this little tower, or, better still, 
from various points farther along the island-shore, 
even to look is to be immersed. Before you stretches 
the huge expanse of the upper river, with its belittled 
cliffs, now mere black lines of forest, dull as with 
the sadness of gazing at perpetual trouble, eternal 



374 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xx. 

danger. Anything more horribly desolate than this 
boundless livid welter of the rapids it is impossible 
to conceive, and you very soon begin to pay it the 
tribute of your own suddenly-assumed suspense, in 
the impulse to people it with human forms. On 
this theme you can work out endless analogies. Yes, 
they are alive, every fear-blanched billow and eddy 
of them — alive and frenzied with the sense of their 
doom. They see below them that nameless pause 
of the arrested current, and the high-tossed drift of 
sound and spray which rises up lamenting, like the 
ghosts of their brothers who have been dashed to 
pieces. They shriek, they sob, they clasp their white 
hands and toss their long hair ; they cling and clutch 
and wrestle, and, above all, they appear to bite. 
Especially tragical is the air they have of being 
forced backward, with averted faces, to their fate. 
Every pulse of the flood is like the grim stride of a 
giant, wading huge-kneed to his purpose, with the 
white teeth of a victim fastened in his neck. The' 
outermost of three small islands, interconnected by 
short bridges, at the extremity of this shore, places 
one in singularly intimate relation with this por- 
tentous flurry. To say that hereabouts the water 
leaps and plunges and rears and dives, that its 
uproar makes even one's own ideas about it in- 
audible, and its current sweeps those ideas to per- 
dition, is to give a very pale account of the universal 
agitation. 

The great spectacle may be called complete only 
when you have gone down the river some four miles, 
on the American side, to the so-called rapids of the 
Whirlpool. Here the unhappy stream tremendously 



xx.J NIAGARA. 375 

renews its anguish. Two approaches have been 
contrived on the cliff — one to the rapids proper, the 
other, farther below, to the scene of the sudden 
bend. The first consists of a little wooden cage, of 
the "elevator" pattern, which slides up and down a 
gigantic' perpendicular shaft of horrible flimsiness. 
But a couple of the usual little brides, staggering 
beneath the weight of gorgeous cashmeres, entered 
the conveyance with their respective consorts at the 
same time with myself; and, as it thus carried 
Hymen and his fortunes, we survived the adven- 
ture. You obtain from below — that is, on the 
shore of the river — a specimen of the noblest cliff- 
scenery. The green embankment at the base of the 
sheer red wall is by itself a very fair example of 
what they call in the Eocky Mountains a foot-hill; 
and from this continuous pedestal erects itself a 
bristling palisade of earth. As it stands, Gustave 
Dore" might have drawn it. He would have sketched 
with especial ardour certain parasitical shrubs and 
boskages — lone and dizzy witnesses of autumn; 
certain outward-peering wens and warts and other 
perpendicular excrescences of rock; and, above all, 
near the summit, the fantastic figures of sundry 
audacious minor cliffs, grafted upon the greater by a 
mere lateral attachment and based in the empty air, 
with great slim trees rooted on their verges, like the 
tower of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence. The 
actual whirlpool is a third of a mile farther down 
the river, and is best seen from the cliff above. 
From this point of view, it seems to me 'by all odds 
the finest of the secondary episodes of the drama of 
Niagara, and one on which a scribbling tourist, in- 



376 PORTRAITS OF PLACES. [xx. 

effectively playing at showman, may be content to 
ring down his curtain. The channel at this point 
turns away to the right, at a clean right-angle, and 
the river, arriving from the rapids just above with 
stupendous velocity, meets the hollow elbow of the 
Canada shore. The movement with which it betrays 
its surprise and bewilderment — the sudden issueless 
maze of waters — is, I think, after the Horseshoe 
Fall, the very finest thing in its progress. It breaks 
into no small rage ; the offending cliffs receive no 
drop of spray ; for the flood moves in a body and 
wastes no vulgar side-spurts ; but you see it shaken 
to its innermost bowels and panting hugely, as if 
smothered in its excessive volume. Pressed back 
upon its centre, the current creates a sort of pivot, 
from which it eddies, groping for exit in vast slow 
circles, delicately and irregularly outlined in foam. 
The Canada shore, shaggy and gaudy with late 
September foliage, closes about it like the . rising 
shelves of an amphitheatre, and deepens by contrast 
the strong blue-green of the stream. This slow- 
revolving surface — it seems in places perfectly still 
— resembles nothing so much as some ancient palace- 
pavement, cracked and scratched by the butts of 
legionary spears and the gold-stiffened hem of the 
garments of kings. 



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